"Back when ridge till was in it's infancy the big benefit or claim was the fact that they planted into the same row year after year"

When ridge till was in its infancy, the ridges were almost a foot tall and were pretty much demolished and rebuilt every year. Corn rootballs were totally cleaned out of the rows. 

Ridge till gradually evolved into lower, wider ridges that were not completely removed each spring. There was a time when planting into ridge till cornstalks we tried to separate the stalk from the rootball in the spring with a goal of leaving the rootball but clearing the stalk. Leaving the rootball was important so you did not have a series of voids with seed dropped into midair.

However today, many of the now even tougher corn rootballs from today's hybrids require a "stalk puller" to be run after harvest in the fall where discs pinch off the corn plant at or just below the ground, removing most of the plant out of next years seed path.

Ridge till has changed.

One of the benfits of the original ridge till system however is controlled traffic - you never drive where you are going to plant.

Our Dawn strip till works fine making strips right down the top of a harvested soybean stubble row. Our system and really none off the others does near as good a job trying to make a strip right down the top of perhaps a just-harvested new 10 ft tall, almost tree-like, maybe bt, irrigated Nebraska corn stalk & rootball. The stalks just do not separate from the rootball in the fall and maybe not even in the spring. Try pulling a modern corn plant stalk - almost always you will get the rootball and every thing.

So when making strips into harvested corn stalks we generally go down between the rows while driving on the just-harvested stalks. This has some of the benefits of controlling traffic.

Recently several innovative customers have adopted the system of stripping at an angle to the harvested corn rows for several reasons, many coverred in the residue thread below.

Basically, it is physically impossible to make a strip directly down a modern day harvested corn stalk row, especially in the fall, unless you completely pull the rootball out. In aridge till system this leaves you at about level ground. In a non-ridged strip till system, pulling the corn stalk and rootball out will leave you a depression where your row will be - the exact opposite of the bit of a mound you want.

Making a strip right down on top of this year's corn stalks is not a matter of "handling trash". It is a matter of leaving a void/valley down the planters path. It only works if you use a stalker or some other additional passes to eliminate the voids. jmho and experience. 

Jim at Dawn