EC MN - Hour North of 'The Cities' | We recently purchased an Ag Systems 132 dry fertilizer bander to add to our collection of dry band/strip till equipment. This is a drawbar pull caddy that has a stainless steel 4-5 ton box with 8 outlets. On the back of it is its own 3 point where a vertical fold toolbar is mounted with 8 deep band coulters with mounted knives behind the coulters for placing nutrients into ridges in a ridge-till system.
This compliments our collection of fertilizer tools that consist of a Concord 1100 air cart with hoses and manifolds that will fit on our 16R30 JD 1770NT, a 13 knife Nitromaster anhydrous bar, as well as our Willmar UT 57 fertilizer tender.
Our initial plan was to pull the Concord behind the planter and blow on our P & K (approx 25 lbs of N in addition to the P&K for corn) in a 2X2 band using our newly modified Sunco Nutri-mate double disk openers. We would then come back with the Concord and a 3 point bar to band Urea on 60" centers for corn sidedress before the crop would get up to 1' tall. We would continue to use our rotary harrow as our main tillage tool, but also pondered the idea of our own strip till setup using Rawson coulters on a seperate toolbar.
Now that we have an "all-in-one" fertilizer applicator (Ag Systems 132), our thiking has changed somewhat.
The new plan is to setup the Ag Systems with 8 strip till units (probably a shank to penetrate in the fall) and apply our P&K in the fall. I would love to apply our N at that time, but our coarse soils don't allow for this to happen. Then we would come back in the spring and either freshen the strips with a 8 or 16 row Rawson coulter sysytem, or use our rotary harrow (43' would cover 16R30). Then we would plant on the top of the fall-made strips, and come back with our Nitromaster bar that would be widened out to accomodate the 8 deep band coulters set on 60" centers to apply our sidedress Nitrogen in corn.
To compare the new sysytem from the old, our tillage plan was to harrow our bean stubble in the spring, have the co-op broadcast spead fertilzer, and then come back and harrow the fertilizer into the soil. The rotary harrow works great to dry out our pasty soil in the spring to make a suitable seedbed to plant into, but we would like to see more tillage to get the surface darker and warmer. In our area of the world, fall tillage makes a world of difference in getting any sunlight into dark ground to get the soil warmed up. We used to chisel our corn stalks in the fall, but any fall-loosened ground was quite soupy in the spring comapred to undisturbed ground. We believe that strip till will provide firmer ground than full width tillage, but give us a warmer seedbed than our shallow tillage of a rotary harrow.
Because we have a corn/soybean/wheat roatation, our residue level is not as high as continuous corn, and therefore I believe it will be easier to handle the residue. Our reason for going to this setup compared to our previous tillage sysytem of a rotary harrow, is to get the seedbed a little darker to help emergence speed up, and with the windy days this past spring, there were mountains of corn residue placed sporadically through our newly planted bean fields.
With these tools at hand, how would you use the equipment to apply nutrients in this tillage system, what would you add or subtract from the line-up, or would you go about it completely different?
Thanks,
Lance |
Fertilizing/Strip till in a corn/soybean/wheat rotation
