|
| Chad,
This won't be in any certain order. This is our first spring with a 1770 ccs 16-30's. We've got Yetter shark tooth trash cleaners with depth bands with Deere's 13 wave coulter inbetween them. To get 2" deep which we consider the minimum to plant corn to keep the brace roots from coming out on top of the ground we were set similar to yours. I think I had 2 holes on one side and on on the other under the T handle. Our bar did sit lower than yours, when in the ground the parallel bars on the linkage were close, but not quite horizontal, just, just barely pulling up hill a small amount. In worked soil we could back off to about 60psi (don't know the lbs) In notill I had it above 90 psi which I think is the 300 lb mark without going out to look. When I was running I kept looking at the row unit to see if it was flexing up and down easily and not being forced down so hard it would not work. I never did get the pressure so high that it didn't seem to be able to easily flex over the land. I also watched the guage wheels, especially on some rougher ground and higher speeds. If I lowered the pressure very much I could see them start to bounce more but the row unit was not moving up or down. At those times if I got out and looked the guage wheels were probably not touching much and there was very little track from them in the dirt behind the planter. I don't know if you can see it with the DB bar or if you'll have to have someone ride the planter to get a good look.
I don't have any answers about the trash problems, but I can see where it would be hard to handle with that spacing. I know friends who run 15's down here can sometimes have a very bad problem with trash or loose sand.
We tried to run some notill in bean stubble and while we had trouble getting the units into the ground it was because it was so dry down here. The ground dried out and got hard as a rock. Some of the true notill guys even quit planting because it was so dry. We farm beside some that have been notill for a long time and with all the fanfair about ground tilth etc I decided to look for myself to compare while we had some extreme conditions. I found their ground was just as hard as ours if we had not done anything to it, and ground that we had run a DMI2500 ripper across or even had just run a JD726 mulch finisher across earlier in the spring was in much better shape, had more moisture and was no problem to plant into. I was a little surprised that just running the narrow standard on the 2500 actually had affected the dirt all the way between them, but it's one of those things where I saw it for my own eyes.
Now to your fertilizer and thought about banding and strip till. We ridge tilled for about 10 years when at the time we had a much larger percentage of our groud that could be farmed straight. Through development from the cities our mix had changed to about 75% terraced land. At about the same time our mix was changing my wife got sick and during the time we were taking care of her farming became a "get it in the ground, get it sprayed, anyway, who ever we could find to run a planter, just get it done" thing. We had to plant to make a living, but it was at the bottom of the priority list. Just get it done and move on. Keeping a planter on ridges, especially on some curves is not something you can just throw someone into and get it done correctly. Now with such a high percentage of contours ridging is not an option for us.
That said from what I've seen of your pics if you've got a lot of fairly flat straight land I would look hard at some sort of ridges. A strip till on steroids if you want to call it that. While were were ridging we were running a Flexi Coil blowing dry to a DMI applicator and pulling a NH3 wagon behind it. We found that if we ran dead center on the row, especially on lighter, sandy soils we could very easily burn some roots off with the nh3. In our conditions we found we had to move at least 4" away from the row to get away from this root burn. The problem being without rtk and running in a separate operation maintaining a 4" buffer was very tough to do. Whenever we got closer it was really easy to find the stunted plants in the field. We had the applicator set with the knives to the outside on both halves so if we happened to slide one way or the other 8 rows would get further away and 8 would get closer and you could pick those spots out very easily.
We looked at a lot of research from our local Universities and from U of Minn. Short term there is no doubt you can cut rates with banded fertilizer. We ran some side by sides on our irrigated land. We found we could cut rates by 25% and still maintain yield, but if we had water we found we could keep the rate the same and increase yields 12 to 14 bpa in corn with yield levels in the upper 100's and low 200's. The research we had going all went up in smoke when my wife got sick.
Personally I don't think you can do this on a continueing basis and still maintain yields and/or fertility levels in your soil. The fellow we were working with here at KSU felt that long term continued use of rate reductions would eventually mine fertility out of the soil. It was explained to me that while banding may keep more fertilizer available to the plant now, if the plant uses that fertilizer then over the long run there will not be fertilizer added back into the soil chemistry and the levels of nutrients coming out of that chemistry and being available for the plant each year will start dropping. I hope that makes sense, in other words there is a cycle of nutrients being tied up and going through the process of becoming available again and if you shut off the front end, eventually it will show up at the back. I know that in Minnesota they have shown that while soil test levels may not drop there is a definate advantage to adding some potash to the mix even when it doesn't call for it.
Don't know if any of this will help with your conditions being so much different than ours, but I hope so.
Take care,
Ray | |
|
Anyone here run planters on Bauer Bars??? Jim you may want to jump in here as well......
