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NE CO | Yes Matt, I do try and do no-till right, Shelbourne stripper header, JD 1890 drill, in-row placement of phosphorous, no grazing of corn stalks, no residue removal for hay, etc. As far as micronutrient deficiencies, I suppose it is possible, but never any symptoms when water is available. One year I used the pellitized Cargill(?) fertilizer which I think had sulfur and zinc included with the phos and small amount of nitrogen because 11-52-0 was not available for all of my wheat drilling and saw no difference in appearance or yield for the two fertilizer formulations.
I stand by my statement that sometimes fallow is a necessary evil to keep no-till rotations going. When wheat stubble is thin (say a 10-15 bu/ac), the corn planted into it the next spring just doesn't have the soil protection it needs to work. One year the corn hardly cleared the top of the abnormally short wheat stubble. I was losing organic matter in the soil that year despite my best efforts. Millet into that seedbed failed the next year as well. It was essentially bare soil by spring. Multiple dry years in a row requires hedging your bets. Some land stayed in continuous rotations and some went to fallow. The fallowed land recovered sooner and was more profitable during the drought years.
We are back into more normal rainfall patterns and I probably won't have any summerfallow next year. Hopefully it will be a long time before we return to those long periods of drought, but if we do, I won't hesitate to return some ground to fallow, especially strips in larger fields to hedge against winter wind erosion. I still have one 1/4 mile wide by 1 mile long field divided into three fields recovering from the drought years in the mid 2000's. | |
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No till crop rotation... Too much?
