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southern MN | I was at a meeting last year, extension typ meeting talking about this & that to improve farming. Got to talking about tiling. I think they were putting in stop gates to the tile lines, see if that helped conserve water over the middle of summer.
I got to talking to the guy next to me, and how the ground is valleys & sidehills and very wet by me. He said yea, thay had trouble with an area like that, no more troubles now that they put that 100 acres into CRP, made farming that part of the farm a lot more fun.
Well. Ecconomies of scale I guess. If I put 100 acres into CRP, I'd be losing 1/3 of my farm - time to hang it up! :)
Anyhow, I have to be pretty ecconomical on my experiments, and keep the scale pretty small.....
I'm watching Greywolf's work with striptill. My ground is a little more uneven and a little more wet, little more clay than his, but at least the same neighborhood. Once they get that sutff dialed in a little closer, and some used equipment shows up so a bottom feeder like me can afford it.... ;)
In FFA I was in the soils competition. Even went to state our senior year. Our advisor told us, now when you get to regional or state, you have to think differently. No one else has soil like ours, you'll have to think at least some loam, some sand in the texture. You can't just put down pure clay & be right all the time without checking it, most soils have some particles in them other than around here.
My goal is to be profitable on a very tiny bit of land these days. I really enjoy these conversations. Sometimes one side or the other will get a little preachy, but that's cool, it's wintertime. :) I like to learn, even if it doesn't actually change what I do this year or the next. Learning is always a positive thing, even if it's 10 years before anything actually changes.
--->Paul | |
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The no till debate - A different perspective
