|
WC Mn/Dakotas | A response from another post got me thinking about what various growers are looking to achieve fertility wise by strip tilling.
I come from the red river valley and sugar beet production where the blacker the better has been the moto for 40 years. A few of my peers and i joke about beet farmers thinking they arent farming if they dont work a field 17 times a year. But seriously i think we are losing our top Soil at an alarming rate.
I started working with a fertility specialist a couple years ago and he has a calcuation for P and K if you broadcast and another one if you deep band and another if you plant on top of the band.
To me strip till is becoming very attractive fertility wise. I do intensive zone map building and soil sampling coupled with a yield goal for each zone based off of multiple years of that crops yield maps for each field. Those yield goals with the zone soil test results drives our variable rate P K N and any lime or gypsum treatments. Sometimes we have to bring levels down, some up, or special treatments on others.
I visualize taking a heavy duty sidedress or light duty strip till unit to place a bulk of our vrt fertilizer more efficiently. The problem i see is that nearly all the growers i work with run 22" planters that are 66'-88' wide. And some farms have multiple planters that big.
With alot of our pH being 7.5-8.5 we could potentially use 40-50% less PK if we "strip tilled" than broadcast. Our planters could plant into a smoother seedbed with less trash being hairpinned.
So i would like to put vrt PK and maybe flat rate some esn or ams 4-6" deep. Then some PKZn in a popup. Followed by sidedressing or top dressing the renainder of the N vrt.
So what do you do strip till for and how do you approach your variable fertility needs? With strip till or with some other application? | |
|
What is strip till about?
