Harold Grall already had extensive experience growing corn and grain sorghum in the Texas Panhandle when he bought out his mentor, Dale Coleman, and started farming on his own in 1994. At that time, he was farming 3,700 acres of High Plains silt-clay loam just north of Dumas, Texas, and was committed to ridge-till and furrow irrigation.
Today, he and his wife, Stacey, strip-till Hasta Farms’ 8,600 acres of land and have fine-tuned the operation to 90-93% continuous corn growing under 26 center-pivot irrigation systems — 10 of them half-mile-long, full-section rigs.
Grall says while he’s farming nearly twice the land today, he burns about 70% of the diesel fuel he used in the late 1990s.
“In 1997, we had 4,500 acres of row crops and burned 30,772 gallons of diesel fuel,” he says. “In 2015, we had 7,000 acres of row crops, and our fuel use was 22,033 gallons.”
His corn grows on 3-4 gallons per minute of irrigation water per acre, compared with 6 gallons per minute required in the 1990s, and his soil test results show his farm has doubled the organic matter it had 20 years ago.
Last season, which brought generous moisture, Hasta Farms binned a bumper crop…
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On this episode of Conservation Ag Update, brought to you by Martin-Till, precision specialist Chad Baker, co-owner of Baker Precision Planter Works in Orangeville, Ill., helps a first-generation no-tiller with planter setup, and later encounters a couple problems with a strip-tiller’s new 24-row planter. Plus, veteran agronomist Brad Forkner checks in with a couple tips for farmers to keep in mind before they take the field.
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