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On this edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Sound Agriculture, Elora, Tenn., native Eric Reed shares the keys to his high-yielding success. 

“Our dirt is the kind they build racetracks on,” Eric Reed says. 

Reed grows corn, soybeans and cotton on the Tennessee/Alabama border. Despite limited resources and soil that’s “as red as can be,” Reed increased his yields dramatically over a couple years, including a 100-bu./acre bump with corn. 

The first-generation farmer set the Alabama National Corn Growers Assn. dryland corn yield record on poor grounds with a low budget — and he’s on a mission to teach others how to achieve similar success in less-than-ideal conditions.

“I want to teach the farmer who thinks they can’t make it work because of financials, equipment or poor soils that they can do this.”

Reed sits down with technology editor Noah Newman to discuss some of the keys to his success, and preview his upcoming presentation, “Making Strip-Till Work on a Low Budget,” at the National Strip-Tillage Conference, Aug. 2-4, in Bloomington, Ill.

The Strip-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by SOURCE®️ by Sound Agriculture.

SOURCE provides 25 lbs of nitrogen and 25 lbs of phosphorus, leading to more productivity and supporting your fertilizer reduction goals. This foliar applied biochemistry has a low use rate and is tank mix compatible, getting a free ride into the field. Check out SOURCE — it's like caffeine for microbes. Learn more at www.sound.ag

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Full Transcript

Welcome to the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Sound Agriculture. Great to have you with us as always. My name's Noah Newman, technology editor. Today we're catching up with Eric Reed, who farms in the Alabama, Tennessee border. Reed shares the keys to his record-breaking success, and also gives us a sneak peek of his upcoming presentation at the National Strip-Till Conference in Bloomington, Illinois.

Well, Eric, thanks for taking the time to join us. I know it's a really busy time of the year for you. For our audience who's not familiar with you, I'll give you the time now to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into farming, where you're located, a little bit about your operation and so forth.

Yeah, yeah. My name's Eric Reed. I farm down on the state line in Tennessee, but we also farm Alabama. We're directly on the state line, so when people ask me where I'm from, I automatically register them to Jack Daniels distillery. I'm about 20 minutes from Jack Daniels. So everybody knows Jack.

Oh yeah.

That's the easiest way I know how to put it. But on that northern Alabama, southern Tennessee, I farm both sites. Like I said, three counties. We're pretty scattered out. My wife owns a cotton gin with her brother, so cotton is our number one crop. Starting back about seven years ago, I started growing corn for rotation purposes, and we started dabbling in a little bit of beans. Also, like I said, I was primarily 100% on cotton. You can't run corn through a cotton gin. So that's where we were. And I started losing some land due to not rotating.

There's other grain farmers in the area. There's rotating. These landlords were seeing that. All of a sudden, cotton got a bad name. You're washing the ground away, dah-dah-dah. It was the sales pitch is all it was. So I started growing corn about seven years ago, and the first couple years was just mediocre. I mean, 180 bushel. Couldn't get over that hump. And I figured out real quick that growing corn's not as easy as they say it is, number one. Number two, I figured out I had to go to work. And by that I mean I had to figure out how to make more or less. And there was no playbook for this. And by the way, let me back up a little bit. I'm a first generation farmer. I did not grow up in farming. I worked for a guy straight out of high school for about 15 years and he bankrupted.

When he bankrupted, I stepped in and started from there. He was a cotton farmer primarily also. So I had very little experience with grain. The first, like I said, the first two years were mediocre, and I decided I'm going to have to do some legwork here to get these yields up. This is not going to work. I mean, we can't have this mentality of I'm growing it just because so I can put organic matter back into the soil. I had to break that mentality. So I got to doing a lot of research and whatnot and just micromanage myself. There was no playbook for this. I had very little help. And the following year, we went 328 bushels in Tennessee, 316 bushels in Alabama and went 90 bushels soybeans in Tennessee. That was the first year that had the contest there. So we set the Alabama dry land record at 316, which has not been touched to date.

We went 329 bushel in Tennessee, one estate there. This is dryland corn now, no irrigation. First year they had the soybean contest, we won it too. When I did that, that was a pretty astonishing feat that we'd done. And I was like, you hear the term all the time. Once you get on top of the ladder, there's nowhere to go, but straight to the bottom. And I told my wife, I said, "We're up here on the top. We got to stay on the top now." We just started micromanaging everything, carrying the corn over to the cotton, the cotton, over to the beans. We started managing all three crops with high management practices. We got totally away from dry fertilizer. We went to nothing but chicken litter, nothing but what the planter carried on it also. And we've been at the top ever since. We had a bad year last year and was still at the top.

It goes back to having a plan, sticking with your plan, even though the weather is kicking you in your tail. Stay with your plan. Don't deviate. Listen to what the crop is telling you to do and do it. Be a student of the crop. That crop's telling you what to do. If you are smart enough to read that crop and understand what it's telling you at what times and just do it. It doesn't matter what mother nature's doing. Just do it. It's going to reward you. We focus big on stress mitigators, trying to keep the stress off that plant because you never want that plant regardless of what crop it is, you never want that plant to have a bad day. Because when it has a bad day, it has a real bad day. So we just try to never, ever let it have a bad day.

We never give up on the crop. We work it all the way through. Some people, they lay their corn by and they're going to the beach. You see them. They put pictures on Facebook, "Hey, we're at the beach drinking cold beer, dah dah dah." And here I am still running through this corn or still running through the beach or whatever. We'll make six or seven trips through the corn before it gets the tassel and then we go to the helicopter. So I mean, we're constantly working in the crop, and that's the only way you get into this next level club. And people ask me all the time, they're hunting for this silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. It is a executed plan. When you break, and I've learned this through NCGA in several years of this. When you break the 275 bushel mark, every bushel after that is a knockdown, drag out cat fight to get one more bushel.

Interesting. I never thought of it that way.

It's something about that threshold. And that's the threshold. I'm telling you. The 275 mark. When you hit that mark, to grab one more bushel is just astronomical. I mean, just a witch hunt basically. We've stayed in the 300 club for Lord ever since we've been in it.

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And as you were telling me where you farm, you have a lot of challenging conditions. I mean, the soils you said is red like a dirt track, and you're going to be sharing a lot of that at the National Strip-Tillage Conference in your session is how to make strip-till and high yielding success in less than ideal conditions. So what can we expect from your presentation?

Yeah, yeah, I mean I had several things written down here. I was going to go over a list. The impacts of long term no till. That was one of them I had on my mind. Nutrient stratification was one/ soil health, soil structure, soil biology. Like I said, don't be adding foreign biology to your soil. That's the number one no-no rule. It will cause you more damage than it will do good. You'll kill off your biology. We've actually seen it here twice. It happened.

Toxicity of dry fertilizer, I'm against it. Salt levels are extremely high. I don't like it. I think it does more damage than it does good. And some places can't get chicken litter. I understand that. But you need to source out some ahead of time. There's places you can get it, I promise you. You need to remember this thing. From May 1 to May 2, if this guy got it, this guy can get it. It can always be done. You've got to say, you've got to break that mentality of, "I can't or this can't do it." Yeah, you can. Get up off your rump and go do it. Get it done some way, somehow. Figure it out. I've had to do that all my life. Figure it out.

Yeah, I mean, you're a first generation farmer. You didn't have a playbook. You're creating your own playbook. So you're going to be sharing that with people.

Yeah. And I had a hard life, just to be honest with you. I haven't had my family since I was 13. So there's been a lot of figuring out, and I think that carries over into my farming. Somebody may come on my driveway and tell me no. Well, that don't mean nothing to me. World's full of people. You just got to find that one fish. Get it done. I don't want to hear it. I have employees all the time say, "I can't." I said, "I don't want to hear that word. Don't tell me you can't because you can." "Well I can't." "Yeah, you can. Do it. Figure it out." And that's what I've had to do all my life is just figure it out. And like I said, that's carried over into my farming.

Another thing I wanted to want to speak on is being proactive. Don't sit here and wait on threshold, bugs and dah dah dah. You've got to be proactive in all of this. I've never had anything fall in my lap. I've had to go out and hunt for it. You have to be proactive. In every step of this as far as seed variety, seed placement, planter's set up, so on and so forth, you have to be proactive in that in order to achieve these high yields. I got inline rippers. I got a new 2660 vertical tillage tool from Deere, and I used to run around here with sort of mulch finishers, whatever. And we would all go scuff the ruts in or whatever. But this 2660 vertical tillage tool I think is by far one of the best tools Deere has ever put out. It works really good in no-till as far as incorporating residue and whatnots.

We use it for warming the soil in the spring. It's what we use it for. I like to what I do, what I call tickle tillage, with us tickle the ground a little bit. And what that does is it lets the sun radiate that heat off of that ground and you actually get the ground temperature to raise up about five or six degrees from where it should be. That's what we found here on our farm. Plant health, stress mitigators. There is several different kinds of stress mitigators out there. Kelpene is going to be an almost all of them. Kelp, which is seaweed, basically. It's all about how that seaweed is processed for it to be the best stress mitigator. There on the end, like I said, just never giving up on the crop. Work it all the way through. Once we get into tassel from that point on, we're working on grain field.

What I mean by that is we're trying to fill that ear all the way to the tip. We don't want any dent to amount to anything. I don't have the ability to water my corn because we're all dry land. But what I can do is keep feeding that crop and try to cut down that dent a little bit. I want big kernels. When you're trying to do it or you're trying to do, you want a hybrid that has a pretty good size kernel. You want to be able to take that kernel and lay it over the top of a dime and it cover that whole dime. That's how you try to pick that hybrid that's going to push you into this three and 400 bushel mark. We've harvested some 400 bushel corn. We've never registered any 400 bushel corn. So I think we're real close into breaking into that 400 bushel club.

Think we still have few more things to figure out. Do I think it's going to be a cakewalk? No way. Like I said, I think we're real close though. If we can get mother nature to play ball a little better. Up until recently, she's been playing chess, and I've been playing checkers. You got to have a lot of things working in tandem when you're dry land. It's not easy at all because crop gets stressed, and the only way that I can take the stress load off of it is through fungicides and stress mitigators. And I have to be constantly on top of that. Constantly watching that corn every night to see how far it is stressed. And I also come out of a morning and I want to see how soon it starts rolling up. If I come out the door at 7:00 in the morning, it's already rolled up, we're in trouble.

Anytime you see the nighttime temperature with a seven in front of it, you're losing yield.

Oh man.

Six or seven bushels is what you're losing. You want it to say 60, 68, 65, somewhere along in there at night. That corn plant has to respirate. It's just like us. When we work out here in the hot sun all day long, the first thing we want to do over afternoon is come run and take a shower and sit down in a recliner. We corn plant's the same way. It has to have a breather, and that's its time to breathe is at night. It has to be able to cool down. Here in the south, we don't have a lot of cool down periods. We have bad humidity. This will be my first time up into the corn belt so I'm-

Yeah, I was going to say it. This is new territory for you, so you got to be pretty excited about this.

I've never been up into that part of the country. Kentucky is as far as I've been. Well, I say that. I've been up in there, it's been in the dark. I've never been the daylight. It's definitely different terrain up there. And I know that it's different dirt, but here's the takeaway from it. It's still soil. I like to box up some of this dirt and bring it up there and throw it on the table and just show them.

You should do it. Bring it.

Just show them what I'm literally working with here. This dirt, low CCs, I'm talking less than 1%. Low organic matter, I think 1.32 organic matter. Terrible. Back in the, we've always moldboard plow being in cotton business. We've moldboard plowed ever since lower the 70s, all the way up to probably 95-ish. We used to run around here with 15 to 20 moldboard plows running at same time.

Oh wow.

Yeah. And we ran two crews, one in the day, one at the night, and we ran around the clock. That's only way we could ever plow 6,000 acres. Doing that created a lot of problems. But that was the way we combated weeds in the cotton Cause there is no good chemistry to kill weeds in cotton. There still isn't to date other than dicamba. And it's just about played its course too. We created a lot of problems.

We lost a lot of our topsoil. It ended up in the bottoms. We eroded a lot of heels, and we didn't know any better. Now we know better now. I want them to be able to learn something from this. Not get stuck in a rut because a ruts nothing but a grave with the ends kicked out. Farmers or creatures of habit. We do it this way because it's easy or this is the way my granddaddy done it, my daddy done it. This is the way I'm going to do it. You cannot have that mentality with $4.75 corn and $8 on beans, or you'll be broke.

And if you want to hear more from Eric, you can check him out in person at the National Strip-Tillage Conference coming up August 2nd through 4th in Bloomington, Illinois. Head to striptillfarmer.com for more information and to register. Until next time for all things strip-till, head to striptillfarmer.com. I'm Noah Newman. Thanks for tuning in. Have a great day.