Occasionally, we sit through a conference a ways from home, or see something on the internet with people saying how wonderful it is, and decide that we want to try it.

Sometimes, we discover that not all technologies or solutions will transfer to a region with different climate - moistures, soil types, crop mix, latitudes.

My opinion and observation is that the chopping cornhead may be one of them. In the 'cornbelt proper' where a lot of corn comes off in late Sept/early Oct, then they finish up with beans, sizing residue for either rapid decomposition in no-till or to facilitate fall tillage - chisel, disk, disk-ripper, or fancy disk (Pottinger, Lemken, Amazone, yadda, yadda) is beneficial.

Where the wheels come off is generally with latitude, exacerbated by crop mix. So, in the Great Lakes Basin, @ 43 degrees N, we plant winter wheat after soybeans. Beans get harvested first. Then, in order to mature 100 day RM corn, we utilize the full season. Corn is first planted, last harvested. We'd like harvest to be in October on dry ground, but invariably it will drag into November, with the odd year of December if we start fighting lake effect snows. Our experience, if we use a chopping cornhead late in the fall, especially on top of snow, and then the snow doesn't leave until late March, the first that residue sees of unfrozen soil is only a few weeks ahead of planting. That mat of residue will keep the soil cold, and furthermore will suck up any free soil N to help fuel the microbial degradation. Our experience with no-till soys up here following corn is to leave the stalk as intact and erect as possible to keep residue up off the soil until after planting. After beans are in the ground, then we'll roll.

I'm not going to refute the Beck's results - and its not a "my farm/soil is different, and that won't work here", but a buffet of factors including harvest date and conditions, length of time we remain frozen, short interval between "winter" and planting (we can have a freak snow off the lakes the first week of April and be planting corn/soys 2 weeks later).

I suspect the change starts to occur around I-80 as you head north, and a couple hundred miles north of that, a chopping head could be more of a liability I some tillage/rotation systems.

Throwing that out for discussion.

Ken

Edit for grammar / syntax.