flyinfarmer - 10/4/2025 09:01

Just finished with beans and was reminded over and over again how wet it was around for post spraying in beans. My farming practice is no-till the beans, then have strip till done in the Fall ahead of corn (dry fert + NH3). While we have had sprayer ruts occasionally, this year is exceptionally bad. My concern is that more often than I would like, the strip till rig is going to put a row right on top of each of those ruts (they're 10' on center). This is going to mess with the job the strip till machine will do some, but my bigger concern is planting into the strips next year - I can easily see a gage wheel sitting up on one edge of those ruts and seed just dropping on top of the ground in the rut. Or if it does get planted, it seems like depth control will be non-existent. Maybe I'm all concerned over nothing, but it seems like this is going to be a problem.

So how to resolve it - I could go and disk down everywhere this has happened, but that just seems like a bad solution - tilling a 20' wide path just to fix a couple 20" wide problems. Thought about a tile trench closer, but those seem to more tailored for moving a couple 'berms' of dirt on either side of the trench back to right over the trench. I'm wondering about a pivot track closer. I'm in Eastern Iowa, so those things are a foreign concept around here. For those of you in pivot irrigation country, would that be a tool that would work? It would seem like the sprayer ruts and pivot wheel ruts are essentially the same thing. Thoughts?