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| You say how you are disappointed in some posters that go into attack mode, maybe you should reread the first paragraph of your post "Well he's largely an idiot" If you like no-till and its working for you great, but there are other areas where it doesn't work.
Then you go on with this.
All too often farmers just give up thinking why something doesn’t work, shrug and go back to the old practice. In reality it may take a tweak here or there to make something click. When you read cover crop posts you can read between the lines which guys figured that out and are making it work. While the rest come up with excuses why “it can’t work” and slam the practitioners.
I had tried no-till for over 10 years and went to all the meeting and truly believed in the idea, but many years I had problems dealing with too much trash and not getting good seed to soil contact and very poor stands which in the end hurt my yields. I was very careful to keep my planter and drill in excellent condition and always tried to set depth deep enough to try to get threw the trash. I can't tell you how many hours I wasted sitting in the middle of the field searching for seed, only to find it hair pinned and not in the dirt. I also tried many different coulters, trash wippers, and coulter combo on planter to try to make it work.
I also tried many different rotations and cover crops. Up north where it is very cold there just isn't enough time to get decent growth of cover crops in the fall and 1 year when I did get good growth, the next spring it stayed dry and guess what, I seen a major reduction in yield where the cover crop used to much moisture and it did not get replenished.
Since switching back to shank style wheat drill along with nh3, my wheat yields have gone way up. Corn, I went to strip-till and nh3 and again my yields have been off the charts compared to my no-till yields. With beans I have gone to vertical tillage which has really helped on mairstail control and now my beans come up even and have great stands, and the yields in some cases have been double what I used to raise while no-tilling.
I haven't no-tilled for the last 6 years but have neighbors that are like you NO-TILL IS THE ONLY WAY. Last year
I had a bean field with no-till beans on both sides of my field. I started out in the spring with corn stalks. I spread 11-52 and 0-0-60. Then I hit it at about 10 degrees with high speed disk and then planted beans about 2 weeks later. I had a very dry spring and summer last year but then late august had some nice rains. All summer long my beans looked better than the no-tilled beside me. At harvest my field yielded 49 bushels all hauled to elevator, the one neighbor beside me also hauled his to elevator and he told me they didn't break 30 bushel. Now I realize 49 bushel beans is not record breaking by any means, but for the dry year we had I was very satisfied, especially with my recreational tillage destroying all my soil structure.
The other no-till neighbor never did tell me his yield, but he told me when he seen me work that field he thought I was crazy. And then when it wasn't raining he just couldn't figure out why my beans kept looking just as good or better than his. And then at harvest he couldn't believe all the loads we were hauling off. I never walked in their field but I could see from the combine that they just didn't have a nice even stand and many spots where thin.
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Vertical till and soil health
