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What would you do if the axle on your strip-till bar snapped in the middle of a field while you were planting?
Davenport, Iowa, farmer Robb Ewoldt turned this very problem into an experiment — one that ended up proving the difference in yield that strip-till can make compared to no-till.
In this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics, Robb shares the bushel-per-acre results of his unintentional trial, the other lessons learned over his years of strip-tilling, how he’s incorporating cover crops on some of the 2,000 acres he farms and how he’s teaching his nearby city neighbors about conservation agriculture and soil health.
P.S. Hear more about Robb's transition to cover crops and his cover crop goals in this Cover Crop Strategies podcast episode.
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Full Transcript
Michaela Paukner:
I'm Michaela Paukner, associate editor of Strip-Till Farmer. Welcome to this episode of The Strip-Till Farmer Podcast series. I encourage you to subscribe to this series wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribing allows you to receive an alert about new episodes when they're released. Thanks to Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics for supporting this podcast series. Want to do more in 2022? Now available in convenient planter box application, Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics is proven by Beck's 2021 PFR to improve yield by 2.7 bushels per acre in soybeans and 4.6 bushels per acre in corn. It also nets $20,000 more in incremental income with every 1,000 acres planted. To calculate your ROI and purchase Terrasym for only $4.35 per acre, visit newleafsym.com/2022. That's newleaf, S-Y-M, dot-com, slash 2022.
Michaela Paukner:
What would you do if the axle on your strip-till bar snapped in the middle of the field while you're planting? Davenport, Iowa farmer Robb Ewoldt turned this very problem into an experiment, one that ended up proving the difference in yield that strip-till can make compared to no-till. In this episode of The Strip-Till Farmer Podcast, hear what the bushel per acre difference was for Robb's half strip-till, half no-till field, how he's incorporating cover crops on some of the 2,000 acres he farms and how he's teaching his nearby city neighbors about conservation agriculture and soil health. Here's Robb.
Robb Ewoldt:
Robb Ewoldt, farm in Eastern Iowa. I always like to joke and say, "I live three miles north of the Mississippi River," and then that gives everybody pause because they're like, "Well, the river runs north-south," and not where I live. So I live right where they would call the nose of Iowa. And so I farm there with my wife and I have two sons, 13 and 15. And we grow corn, soybeans, alfalfa hay. We have a cow calf operation. We're on about 125,000 cows. When you look at gross dollars, it's not very big percent of our operation. It's more fun. We also do contract finishing for a local hog producer.
Michaela Paukner:
And how many acres are you-
Robb Ewoldt:
Roughly this last year, we're farming 1,400, now we're going up to about 2,000. I have a very good friend of ours from church that's retiring and we were fortunate enough to be able to rent his ground. So it's a nice little growth stage.
Michaela Paukner:
And how many of those acres are strip-till?
Robb Ewoldt:
Anything that we're going to plant corn into is strip-tilled. So typically where we live, we have a lot of variation in our soil types. So we have a lot of fat soils that are on the hills and we have some B, C, D slope hill, so we are open to surface erosion. So we will strip-till those acres in the springtime. Then we have some of what people typically think of Iowa as the rolling black soil, the heavier soils. And those, if they're flat enough, then we will do just strictly a P&K strip in the fall. This year is our first year doing that and it was mainly because of availability of fertilizer and it was also pricing because they couldn't guarantee our spring price. So we decided, "We better do some of these strips in the fall," so that's when we did that.
Robb Ewoldt:
And the reason we wanted to do some fall strips is we don't have a very fancy strip-till bar. In fact, the strip-till bar that I use comes from my local ag retailer and they let me use it because I must be a really nice guy or something. And not many people want to use it, so that's nice and I like to kind of keep it that way because I'm selfish that way. One thing that we're always concerned about is if we can get a rain after our spring strips are put in because we need to pack that dirt down a little bit more. We think we're getting some air pockets when we go through with our planter. 10 days, two weeks later, if we haven't gotten a settling rain, we have those air pockets that we're planting into a little bit.
Robb Ewoldt:
We're not getting the spacings that we want or the germ that we want if it's sitting in an air pocket, if that particular seed falls into an air pocket. So we think by doing the fall strips, we'll pack it down a little bit more and get a little bit better seedbed when we come through with the planter in the spring.
Michaela Paukner:
And what type of strip-till bar are you running?
Robb Ewoldt:
It's a blue one.
Michaela Paukner:
It's a blue one.
Robb Ewoldt:
Well, it's pretty old. It's a BLU-JET I believe is what it is and it's just a 16-row and we do all liquid strips. We don't do any dry fertilizer at all. So it's just a 16-row strip-till bar that has the tank on the back and it's a parallel linkage that goes between the tractor and the tank. It is about as simple of a unit as you can run. And when it's at zero cost to me, I'm good with that. I guess if I owned one, I would want to put some other things on it, but it's basically running a knife in the ground and we're putting that liquid in about six inches, maybe five inches and then it's got the sealers going right beside it to heal it up and that's about all it is really, but most of our strips, we're in a corn-bean rotation.
Robb Ewoldt:
We do do a little bit of corn-on-corn, but that's with our hog manure, so we're planting into the manure, but we're not running the actual strip-till bar on our corn stalks. So we're only going through bean stubble, so that makes it pretty easy for us.
Michaela Paukner:
Why can you do corn-on-corn in the hog manure part?
Robb Ewoldt:
The reason that we're doing corn-on-corn in the hog manure is, where our barns are located, we have 200 acres of our own ground right there. And the hog has produced 150 acres worth of manure every year. And with our manure management plan in the state of Iowa and the nutrient reduction strategy, we're not allowed to put manure on ground going into beans. So I have to keep 150 acres of corn right around that location, and otherwise, the transportation cost of hauling the manure to other farms would just be too much. So we run corn-on-corn.
Robb Ewoldt:
We'll run three years of corn and then one year beans on that. We do it with tankers instead of the umbilical line mainly because I want to plant on the strips. My manure applicators have RTK and then we get the lines from them, so we plant right on top of that manure strip. And all of our manure is put on in the fall and we have a stabilizer that goes with it for nitrogen stabilizer. We don't do anything else to it. We go through with the BLU-JET subsoiler just on the main pass that the manure tanks make because they pack it so much. Otherwise, we're strictly relying on the freeze and thaw action of winter to loosen up that ground for us from the compaction from those tanks.
Robb Ewoldt:
The manure ground was not nearly as ... Our yields weren't nearly as high as they were where we actually ran the strip-till bar. So I think there's a little bit to the tillage part that's there and I think some of our manure, the nitrogen wasn't quite available like we thought it was. And that's why we saw some yield reduction on that ground. Now that we've gone to doing some later season nitrogen application and doing some soil sampling later to see what we have for nitrates, we're getting a lot better results now. So we're planting on top of that manure strip and then we're coming back with a little bit of nitrogen in the planter and then coming back with them again with Y-drops to compensate. So now we're starting to see some really positive results. I'm 49 years old. Maybe we finally figured some of this stuff out.
Michaela Paukner:
How often are you soil sampling?
Robb Ewoldt:
We're going through and we're grid sampling all of our ground. Every farm is going to get done every four years, four to five years. Our manure management plan ground, that's a four-year, and then the rest of the ground, we do every five years. The biggest thing that we're doing is every year we are pulling a nitrate level on the soil as a baseline to know where we're at and then we're doing a lot of modeling through granular which is a company spun off from Corteva. So we're doing nitrogen modeling to see what we need to put on. We're putting on some in in the springtime with the strip-till machine. We're putting another shot in on with our planter and then we pull some more nitrate samples out of the soil when the corns about knee higher or a little bit taller to see what's actually there now and then we take those and use them for our Y-drop and to figure out how many units in we want to put on with our Y-drop.
Robb Ewoldt:
So a really wet year, if we lost some nitrogen, then we need to up it. Average year, we're coming back normally with about 40 units of nitrogen late and we've seen very good results with that.
Michaela Paukner:
Good. What are some of those results?
Robb Ewoldt:
The side by sides, we can see five to 10 bushel of the acre on our side by sides. To come up with a harder number than that, I really can't. And the nice thing is, is that I feel like I can defend myself a little bit better with the public in what we're doing in our operation. We're right outside of an urban area of about 200,000-250,000 people that really are so far removed from agriculture. They have no clue, but they know that the Mississippi flows right by their front door and they want to have good water. And so when we pull these samples and we go in and we say, "Hey, look, this is what the science told us, so this is what we know the plant needs to finish out. So we're not going to put a more on than we have to."
Robb Ewoldt:
Where before, 10-15 years ago, "We knew we wanted to reach this yield goal and this is what it was going to take to get there. Well, maybe Mother Nature wouldn't allow you to get there and you waste a lot of fertilizer. Well, now by doing it in three different steps, we're not wasting the nitrogen. Maybe the nitrogen is still there because it was a dry year from planting season to when we would side dress and we don't need to side dress. Most of the times, it's coming back saying, "Yeah, you need to put a little bit out there and that's where we see that bigger yield bump."
Michaela Paukner:
And what are average yields for you?
Robb Ewoldt:
The longer, we've been doing the no-till, strip-till for 10, 12, 15 years depending with some cover crop in there. And every year, we are going up, and now this last year for our whole operation, we averaged 230 on our corn and we averaged 70 on our beans. We had fields, our top field for this last year and this was without any rain in August. All of my neighbors and I, we talked. We said, "What would we have been if we would have got one or two inches in August? Where would our bean yields have been? Where would our corn yields have been?" But our best average farm was 257, 258 on our corn, which I was very, very happy with.
Robb Ewoldt:
Now that's on our very good ground. On our marginal ground still comes in at about 220, 225. So we were blessed this year. There's no doubt. We had the weather. We could have done a little bit better with some rain, but all in all, it was a great year for growing corn and beans, both. We're starting to see some issues in our area with this tar spot in our corn now, and man, that scares a lot of us, because from what we understand, it came in late this year that it didn't affect us on our yield because our yields were so good. I don't think it affected us, but that's something that we really have to watch because they said it comes into your field, they can shut a corn plant down in about three to four days.
Robb Ewoldt:
So we have to really be watching our fungicide applications. Now the prices are up and we're profitable, we can spend that extra money on maybe another pass with the fungicide and fight that one off. What we're going to do I think is we're going to try to ... On our last herbicide pass, we're going to mix in a fungicide. And then hopefully that gets us to post-tassel. It probably won't quite do it, but we're trying our best. We don't want to do a fifth pass through our corn because when that corn gets tall and we're on the hills, and to be honest, I'm not that great of a driver and I can drive over a lot of tall corn.
Robb Ewoldt:
So we're trying to minimize that, but then we're going to come back and we're going to try to hold off as long as we can, post-tassel, to spray our last round because it seems like that tar spot comes in a little bit later and so we're trying to get the early coverage up to tassel and then might have a week with no protection or week and a half and then we're going to come in and spray again. But it's just going to take a lot more scouting on our end to look and the worst part is by the time you scout, and if you do see something, you're too late. That's the downside, but it's the best we can do.
Michaela Paukner:
How did you first get into strip-tilling and when did you start it?
Robb Ewoldt:
We started using a strip-till bar about five years ago. Before that, we were pretty much no-till, corn-on-corn and I had liquid on a planter. I had starter. I had nitrogen and I always joke that I said this was the poor man strip-till bar and that was just a nightmare and I wasn't ... Our yields were improving, but I talked to other people, "There's a better way" And when I found out that they'd let me use the bar for free no charge, I was like, "I'm in. Let's do it. Let's go." And so we started. And actually two years ago, I had the strip-till bar. It was a smaller field. It was just like a 34, 35-acre field. I had done half the field, literally half the feel, just filled up the tank, started down and the axle snapped on the strip-till bar.
Robb Ewoldt:
And I always had a full 1,400-1,500 gallons of product on and I didn't know what to do. So I called up my ag retailer and I said, "Hey, this big tire just fell off." I said, "You guys want to come out and take a look because I don't know what I'm going to do?" And so they came out and this was the last field of the season. I only had like 17 acres to go and so they just brought out a three-wheel sprayer applicator and it had 15-inch drops to dribble the fertilizer on. So we pumped off the tank, they went out and they did the rest of the field that way. And this was on bean stubble and then we came back and we planted.
Robb Ewoldt:
So half of it was planted into strips and then the rest was just true no-till, and at that time, we did not have nitrogen on that planter. We didn't have any liquid on that planter at that time. We took it to harvest and there was 35 bushel an acre difference between the strips and the 15-inch dribble, all had the same fertilizer. It's just where it was placed ...
Michaela Paukner:
Wow.
Robb Ewoldt:
... and what action was done. You're always going to learn something when something bad happens and so what can we learn from that? And we've been stripping for four years before that, but I never was patient enough to do a side-by-side true comparison. And when we did this, I was like, "Well, why would I ever do anything different than strip-till or 35 bushel an acre? It's crazy." So from then on out, we do all of that
Michaela Paukner:
Why?
Robb Ewoldt:
So yup, you're a little upset that last 17 acres didn't get stripped because you know you gave up bushels, but we learned. We take and run with it.
Michaela Paukner:
Before we get back to the conversation, I'd like to thank our sponsor, Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics for supporting The Strip-Till Farmer Podcast series. Want to do more in 2022? Now available in convenient planter box application, Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics is proven by Beck's 2021 PFR to improve yield by 2.7 bushels per acre in soybeans and 4.6 bushels per acre in corn. It also needs $20,000 more in incremental income with every 1,000 acres planted. To calculate your ROI and purchase Terrasym for only $4.35 per acre, visit newleafsym.com/ 2022. That's newleaf, S-Y-M, dot-com, slash 2022. Let's rejoin the conversation as Robb talks about strip-till lessons and what is cover cropping.
Michaela Paukner:
What are some of the other lessons you've learned from the different strip-tilling?
Robb Ewoldt:
I want to be patient. It's just like trying to be patient when you go out with a planter, you don't want to go out too early in the spring. And that's sometimes hard, trying to cover 700 acres in the spring and then want to have the planters going right behind and one of those tractors that you're using the strip-till goes on a beam planter. You're like, "Well, we really want to get the beans going, but we're still doing a little bit of strip-till and trying to wait." So just patience, but I think that goes with everything. It goes with the planting, not planting too early, not dealing with sidewall compaction. You get into those fields too early with that heavy tank and the big tires, those tracks are there for a long time. And so that's probably the biggest thing that I've learned.
Robb Ewoldt:
On our farm we have a BLU-JET subsoiler and we have a Great Plain TurboMax that has an air seeder on it. And the only time we use it is to seed cover crops. So if I screw up a field, I got to go knock on my neighbor's door to ask for a piece of equipment. I really don't want them to screw up a field basically. The nice thing about this machine that we use is because we're in the hills and we always try to go on the contour, but sometimes you just can't. Sometimes you end up going down a little bit of a hill, and on our strip-till bar, we have an override switch, so when we raise it out of the ground, it will lay it in a strip.
Robb Ewoldt:
Now we're not doing the tillage part, but we are banding it as we go down that hill and it's still on RTK, so we plant right into that band. Now the band's just not four and a half, it's on top of the ground, but it's still better than spreading it out across all the ground.
Michaela Paukner:
Right.
Robb Ewoldt:
And so I learned don't run it down a hill because you'll have issues with washing, especially now with these bigger rain events that we seem to be getting and everything. So I guess those would be about the two things and check the axles and make sure they don't have cracks and-
Michaela Paukner:
You mentioned your neighbor and having to borrow equipment. What are they doing and is strip-till common in your area?
Robb Ewoldt:
Strip-till is not very common in our area. There's a lot of no-till smaller operations. There's still a lot of anhydrous goes on in our country in the fall just because it's cheap. This year, there was a lot that went on because of our nitrogen issues that we have, the shortage. There are still some conventional tillage going on, chisel in the fall and there's a lot of seed corn ground to the north of us, so they have ... Seed companies want it all tilled under and stuff, but a lot of smaller ones will do a weed and feed and try to put it on that way. Still some dry fertilizer thrown all over the ground and not in a band, not worked in, just sitting there which is ...
Robb Ewoldt:
I wonder how good it is because the P&K just doesn't move in the soil profile very fast. And I remember from agronomy class that roots grow down and so I want my fertilizer in the ground. I don't want to attach into a clay particle and then running down to the stream when it erodes off my field. We're starting to see a little bit more strip-till, but the downside is just the cost of the equipment. I'm very, very lucky and I tell my retailer thank you every time I get to use that bar because I don't have to spend 130,000, 140,000 on a piece of equipment. I think that's probably what keeps a lot of the farmers from making a switch to be honest.
Michaela Paukner:
When we were talking earlier, you said speaking for the public who's in more of the urban areas and then you said that you're able to use the science in your soil testing to show them why you're doing what you're doing. What has their reaction been when they're learning about this?
Robb Ewoldt:
Wow is the first thing. They had absolutely no clue and why would they have any clue on what goes into growing a crop? And when you get down and you can show them hard science and numbers, they're so appreciative of the way we're treating the land and realizing that the water quality is a big issue for everybody. And ag is a big component of that water quality. When I get done giving a presentation and talking about it all and showing them the equipment and taking them out for a field walk, they say thank you when we're done. And it's not just because I gave a presentation. They say thank you for the care that we're giving to the soil and the water and that's big. It really is.
Robb Ewoldt:
We're 1.5% of the population feeding the rest of them and we're a pretty small voice when it comes to policymaking. As farmers, we have to inform these people and let them know what we're doing to have them on our side when it comes to voting in policy and issues like that. So that's been my takeaway when we do this. It's been fun. My kids, they attend, they come out and they'll sit in on the presentation. They can probably give the presentation better I can now. We were fortunate enough to receive an award from one of the environmental groups in our area and I remember in the speech and the whole family come up because that's what it's all about and these two kids standing in front of me, I said, "They're so much further ahead in this whole farming, no-till, strip-till, water quality than I ever was at their age."
Robb Ewoldt:
So if there's any question about where agriculture is going, it's on the right track because I basically started from scratch. When I took over my parent's farm when I came back from school, they had chisel plows and field finishers and call the mulchers and just beat the heck out of the ground. And I had to start from zero. And these kids are already starting at the ... I started at the one goal line going on all 100 yards and these kids are going to be starting at about the 50 or the 40-yard line and only have 40 yards to go because they're that much further ahead and I think there's a lot of those kids out there coming up in ag that are that much further ahead than what we ever were. So I think it's great where we're at.
Michaela Paukner:
That you're setting up the next generation for success and you're 1% feeding 99% of us, so it's important that our soil is able to handle that going forward.
Robb Ewoldt:
And we keep seeing it. Our yields keeping ... My parents had both passed, but I tell you what, if I could tell my dad what we grew on some of those clay knobs down there in north, right off the Mississippi, he'd be smiling and he just couldn't believe it, because for a long time, 180-bushel yield was a big yield and now we're at two and a quarter. I know genetics have something to do with it, but I like to think I had something to do with it too. And our soil health is so much better.
Robb Ewoldt:
I remember watching a video of Sonny Beck CEO of Beck's Hybrids out of Indiana and most effective video I think I've ever seen is he takes a spade and he goes into a fence row and he digs up and he shows how it's soft and crumbly that soil is and that fence row. Of course, it hasn't ever been tilled and he says, "How many of us want to have that soil like that out in our fields?" Of course, everybody's going to raise their hand. That is my goal and I don't know if I'll achieve it through our farming practices, but we're getting better. I've had some people from Iowa, Iowa Department of Animal and Land Stewardship come out, our state soil people and do some digging and stuff.
Robb Ewoldt:
Our soil till is coming back. Our structure is coming back. One of the benefits is we don't get stuck anymore. The soil has got the structure and it can handle the water and it can handle these loads going across. It's so much better. And I had a friend describe it. It's like there's a mat out there now that we played out. We've done it enough years. I remember when I was a kid pulling [inaudible 00:28:19] and just having to just sink out of sight in all this ground that we were tilling all the time and we just don't do that anymore. And it's so much easier and more fun to farm now.
Michaela Paukner:
The soil health is a good segue into cover crops. How long you've been doing that in what you're cover cropping?
Robb Ewoldt:
We would chop silage for our cow herd and then we would grow cereal rye and it was more for a selfish reason that we want a cheap feed. My wife and I bought up my parents in '04. In '05, there was a very small drought in our area and it was pretty bad, but we had some rye. We had chopped some corn in '04, just a little. It was a 16-acre field, and on that 16-acre field, we needed about eight more acres is all we need. So we quick chopped the headlands and we chopped off a little bit, and the rest of the corn, we took the grain. That corn where we chopped, we seeded cereal rye in and just went in there with a no-till drill and got it all seeded, came up.
Robb Ewoldt:
'05 comes around, pretty dry and we were late getting to chopping that. So I ended up just mowing it, blowing it back on the ground. We didn't need eight acres of that rye and then we went right in and we just planted beets right into the rye and the corn stalks that were left over from the year before from the corn that we took to grain. We got three or four inches of rain the whole year. It was miserable. That bean field, that little field did 24 bushels per acre average, but where we had the cereal rye it did 36.
Michaela Paukner:
Wow, that's great.
Robb Ewoldt:
Where we had bare corn stalks that we planted into, we did 12. And I have a map and I use it in all my presentations because I'm like, "Look at what this shows us and know it shows us more yield," but I said, "I don't know why it shows us more yield." I think I've gone to a lot of classes since then, but I think what it came down to is that we had a lot of microbial activity happening in the soil where that cereal rye was, and when we planted the beans into it, those microbes are there to help those roots get going and that's why those beans did that much better.
Robb Ewoldt:
So now we try to cover crop a third of our acres to a half if we can. It all depends on time of harvest and if we think we can get good growth before frost. And so sometimes that's a real challenge. If we get a wet fall, I've flown on lots of cover crops in the past, but I just don't like to do that. So that's why we bought this air seeded and had it on this TurboMax because it's 24-foot wide, it doesn't have many bearings and I can go really fast. Now we can put lots of acres down in a short amount of time. I don't like to mess with bean stubble. A lot of these companies that are giving money out for sustainability or regenerative, whatever name is popular now, they're wanting you to put it on bean stubble. Well, we don't get enough growth in the fall. We run a really full season bean, so we're not able to put our cover crop on until probably in the 15th, 20th of October.
Robb Ewoldt:
And our beans stubble with our seeder, it disturbs too much soil and I don't want to do it. So we run it on corn stalks mainly for the benefit that I saw from '05 with microbial activity and helping enhance those beans get started, so we do it all on corn stalks and we run that vertical till with a seeder and had really good luck. The cover crop I think has been a learning experience. We've tried a lot of different stuff. When Iowa came up with their nutrient reduction strategy, it was a voluntary program that then Secretary of Ag [inaudible 00:32:39] came up with because it was when Chesapeake Bay issues were really hot and heavy and all the regulations that were going to put it on and he said, "We need to come up with something to show that we're trying to make things better."
Robb Ewoldt:
And so there was a lot of money there that we could get to educate ourselves about cover crop. And the first year, we used cereal rye and there was a helicopter coming in the area, so I was like, "Well, let's try this helicopter and what would be a good seed?" I did some research in perennial ryegrass. "Well, I got experience with cereal rye grass," I said, "How different can it be?" It turns out it can be really different. The reason I want to use it because it was a small light seed, so the helicopter can haul more acres of seed. That was my thought and he came out there and he spread it over a lot of acres and he said he was spreading that 60 feet pattern maybe.
Robb Ewoldt:
Well, he was spreading out about a 30-foot pattern because I had 30-foot nice dark green strip and then 30-foot of nothing and then 30-foot of a nice green strip and 30-foot of nothing. And then in the springtime when it came time to try to kill that stuff, that perennial rye is tough to kill and that's how I learned, "Well, we're not going to do that anymore," because that was before we were doing our own spraying and my retailer was not happy with me on that deal. But then we tried some tillage radishes and we've tried some clover and we've tried winter wheat.
Robb Ewoldt:
Winter wheat, I don't mind. Winter wheat, it's whatever I can source locally. If there's winter wheat seed, then fine, I'll buy that. If it's cereal rye, it's getting easier to source now, so I'll buy that. But the radishes don't do a whole lot for it. We seed them with an airplane in the standing corn, and by the time we harvest, they were there, but really I thought there was better ways to spend my dollars on cover crop. The clover that we've put out, we have to terminate it before it really actually starts fixing any nitrogen in the springtime. So that really doesn't do anything for me and so my big thing was the cereal rye, the winter wheat, some triticale, those things that they capture whatever's leftover and they hold on to it and that's what I want. And I want green in the spring.
Robb Ewoldt:
We've blown on oats or flown them on into bean stubble before we combine the beans and then that's all right because it terminates on its own when frost comes. So at least you got a little bit more cover out there, but it's all got an expense and you got to look at long term on that cover crop deal. And we're seeing long term now. 10 years in, the soil is getting better. And so that's why I keep going, but this year, Roundup cost is pretty high. The cost of the seeds get up there a little bit more and now you got to, "Who can we partner with that's going to help offset some of this cost on the cover cropping and stuff?" We've gone in and worked with a third party that that's paying us for this practice and it's covering our costs now, so that makes me a little bit better.
Michaela Paukner:
So how are you primarily terminating?
Robb Ewoldt:
Well, chemical. I'm not that brave yet. That brave to roll it and crimp it or I don't plant green. I just haven't gone that far yet. Neighbor is an issue and I can spray 80 acres in not even 30 minutes. Well, how long does it take me to roll it or crimp it? But that's what we're doing, is we're terminating and most of it is with Roundup.
Michaela Paukner:
And are you grazing the cover crops?
Robb Ewoldt:
No, we did not. We were for a while, but anytime a rainstorm would come through, we had to hurry up and push all the cattle off because I did not want hoof tracks. I did not want that compaction. I just thought it was better to take them off of that and then we just got to the point, we're like, "No, we're just not even going to mess with it." And a lot of the fields aren't conducive to grazing because they're further away now. The only time we graze is when they get through the fence.
Michaela Paukner:
Thanks to Robb Ewoldt for today's conversation. Let me know what you thought about this episode by emailing me at mpaukner@lessitermedia.com or calling me at (262) 777-2441. If you're looking for more podcasts about strip-till, visit striptillfarmer.com/podcasts or check out our episode library wherever you get your podcasts. Finally, many thanks to Terrasym by NewLeaf Symbiotics for helping to make this strip-till podcast series possible. From all of us here at Strip-Till Farmer, I'm Michaela Paukner. Thanks for listening.
Music: Lobo Loco - Echoes Boogie Dancehall
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