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On this edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Environmental Tillage Systems, Jodi DeJong-Hughes shares strip-till insights from over 20 years of comparative tillage research. 

DeJong-Hughes has been at the forefront of strip-till related research for over 25 years as a regional educator with the Univ. of Minnesota Extension.

The Strip-Till Farmer Hall of Famer discusses how strip-till stacks up to other systems and deep dives into decades worth of data to see how strip-till performs in even the harshest climates. 

The Strip-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by Environmental Tillage Systems.

SoilWarrior® systems help you defend your land and improve soil quality. With a choice of durable models, features and accessories, your SoilWarrior helps you minimize erosion while creating precise, nutrient-rich zones.

Let us help you defend your land and improve soil quality. Check out SoilWarrior systems online or request a demo today at www.soilwarrior.com. 

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Full Transcript

Hello and welcome to another edition of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Environmental Tillage Systems. I'm your host, Noah Newman. Today, Jodi DeJong-Hughes shares strip-till insights from over 20 years of comparative tillage research. The strip-till farmer Hall of Famer will talk about why she's "still crazy" for strip-till after all these years as she deep dives into decades worth of data to see how strip-till performs in even the harshest of climates. And this is from her 2024 National Strip-Tillage Conference presentation. So let's dive right in. Here's Jody.

I like to start almost every presentation with, we have some of the best soils in the whole world. Farmers say we feed the world, yes. But if you lose that soil, you lose that ability as well. So the darker the color, the higher the organic matter content. And this is something that you directly manage is organic matter. Can't really change your sand, silts or clays, but you can change organic matter. And you can see for Minnesota, so I live right about there. And you can see the glaciers brought newer, that's called newer soils because they're like teenagers. They're very productive and well, when they get out bad, and they are about 11,000 years old. So when you go further south, the soils get older and then how you manage them is going to change. And so I'm not up here to say everything that we do in Minnesota works everywhere. If anybody does that, that's not quite true because we have...

So even what we do from northwest Minnesota, which is about 20 inches of rainfall, down to southeast Minnesota, which is about up to 40 plus inches of rainfall, very different, how they are going to do this. Okay. So organic matter is very important. If you look at organic matter, about 58% of it is carbon. Carbon is black. So the darker your soils are, the more carbon you have in them. And so it's really easy to go by somebody's field. Some of the pictures they showed and they were white soil, I was like, "Ooh, where's your organic matter?" But our farmers just sometimes don't realize how precious the soil is. It's phenomenal. So you may hear people talk about, "Oh, soil, organic carbon," especially academic people, they'll talk about soil organic carbon versus soil organic matter, and they're about the same thing.

The thing is that when they're saying carbon, they're only looking at the carbon in the organic matter, which I said is about 58%. So they're used interchangeably. You'll see the numbers are lower, just bump them up a bit. And then organic matter is also the resiliency in your soil, the ability of that soil to absorb water, to stay hydrated, to battle different changes in the weather. So to build your organic matter is huge. Like I said, you could see the carbon in your soil. And then in 1% organic matter, you have about a thousand pounds of nitrogen. And these prices, of course, fluctuate. You guys, it used to be what? 10 years ago, all the prices were pretty stable. Now it changes all the time.

So phosphorus, about a 100 pounds, potassium a 100 pounds, sulfur, a 100 pounds. And then in 1% organic matter, you have a little over 11,000 pounds of carbon. Organic matter is created by what died and went into it. So it will be somewhat variable. I mean, you can tell a thousand pounds exactly. A 100 pounds exactly. So there are ranges, but this is just to give you an idea that there's a lot of nutrients in that organic matter, it holds onto it. And those can become plant available. Okay.

And so when you're looking at 1% organic matter, you're looking at $1,400 per percent organic matter. And some of the speakers when they're talking that their cation exchange capacity is less than one means they're on sand with no organic matter, which is wow. In Minnesota we have the big black soils and we're usually three to 5% organic matter is what we're working with. And that's a nice percent. In Western Minnesota, where the tall grass prairies. And we started off at 10 to 12% organic matter. And that's what tillage has done, it releases it when you... It makes some of the microbes happy. I know I've heard people say, "Oh, it's like something ripping through your kitchen and killing your whole family." And I'm like, "Okay, wow." But that's more like fungi and anything that has hyphae, you're tearing them apart. But bacteria, you just fed them, you warm them up, they go crazy.

So maybe the people are dead in the kitchen, but all the rats survive. I don't know. I can't think of an analogy for that one yet. I'll keep working on it. So yeah, you wanted build organic matter and why? Oh yeah, this was a actual soil that had changed. So it's nice. Here's one that it's pretty compacted and higher bulk density, very few large pores in it. And you can turn it into a soil that is more than that. I've heard people who sell tillage equipment say you want a homogenous soil, that's why you till down to 16 inches. You really cut it up with the discs and the shanks and you're rolling it over because you want a homogenous soil so the root can grow through there. Okay, this one is homogenous. You have one pore space, itty bitty.

This one is not homogenous. We don't want a homogenous soil. And pretty soon I'm going to say that word enough that I'm going to be like, "Is that even a word anymore? Homogenous?" You know how that happens? Homogenous. Yeah. Yes, I do scroll a lot, okay. Maybe because I'm on TikTok too much. So we try to go for the soil up there and we manage it. We're the ones who can do it. This is an old one, but it still holds true just because some data is old science and the properties of science don't change, hybrids do and things like that. So we're looking at 1% up to 5% organic matter. We're looking at a sandy soil, a silt loam, and a silty clay loam. So this one has more clay in it. And you notice that with more clay, you can hold more water and silty loam and your sands just don't hold a lot of water. That's why most of them are irrigated.

And you can see as you build your organic matter, you're also building the ability of that soil to hold water. So let's look at, take out some of those numbers so it's a little more clear. We're looking here. If you're at 2% organic matter, you can hold in inches in the top foot, 1.4 to 1.8 to 2.4. If you go up 2% organic matter, that's how much you can hold. Okay, well what does that mean? It means that you can wait longer for rain if your soil can hold on to that water. And what this is showing is when corn use is at its top where it's taking a quarter inch of rain every day, how long can you wait in different soil types before you need the next rain? And so you can see if you have very low organic matter, whether you're sand, silt or clay, you got a day, day and a half, and then you need a rain.

Whereas if you have 5% organic matter, you can go a week, week and a half before you need rain. And we know sometimes, not this year in Minnesota, we've got lots of rains. July and August are usually very dry and any half inch you can get, you're just, yeah, waiting for it. So this is helping you stay longer, be able to wait longer for that rain. Again, looking at the 2% to 4% organic matter. If you double it, you double the time that you can wait before you need to rain or run the irrigator. So organic matter is key to that. So the goal is to go from something that we do a lot of tillage to, to something that we let the roots do the tillage. And a show of hands, how many people here on your soils do they crack in the summertime when they dry out. Okay, most.

How about who doesn't? Oh, okay, cool. Because those soils are actually doing deep tillage. So as deep as that crack is going, that's the tillage depth that they're going. So you don't need to till down to there. They do it for you. And we joke that in Fargo, they have the Fargo clay loams, which is the claim to fame for very high clay content, and the cracks will go down four feet easy. And we saw a small child down there, we rescued her, brought her to her parents, they were so happy. It was a beautiful day. We look at water stable aggregates, one of them had been bluegrass and then some conventional corn, and this 125 years of conventional corn and a lot of tillage. And so when they get wet, they fall apart. And I think you've probably seen the slump test and the slight test where they put the little clods in the water and they fall apart or they don't. That's what it's showing here.

So if you're going to drive on this, which one do you want to be in? Yeah, all my pictures are from Minnesota into North Dakota. I'll say that one is North Dakota. It's not Minnesota people. No, but I do want you to know because I also do a lot with compaction. Do you notice this is stuck too, right? Is track, yeah. It's not just tires that will get stuck. Tracks do too. And I can probably guarantee that's their tillage depth. So if you want to know if soil structure is important, have me come out and do a soil pit in your field and I'll make the soil pit bigger than your tractor and then next spring you can call me when you fall into that pit because structure is very important. It's your number one defense against compaction. And so those aggregates is what you really want.

This was at NDSU. If you know Dave Franzen, he was doing some small plots with strip-till, full tillage, which would be a chisel plow and a field cultivation. And so they had a big rain. And anywhere you see the water standing is the tilled plots, and the ones with the residue still standing, that's the strip-till plots. And what happens when you have a saturated soil, you can lose two to four pounds of nitrogen per acre, per day that that soil is saturated.

There's a lot of reasons that we don't want water ponding and we want to get it into the soil quick and we want that soil to hold onto that water. And it's all because of organic matter. So we want to build structure. We want to build those little aggregates because you can see that the water can get into that really quickly. Air is getting into there. Why is air important? A lot of bacteria need the air, but also what about your rhizobium on your soybeans or any of your legumes? Those little pink ones in there, they need oxygen. So if you have soybeans that are only have their nodules up at the surface, there's reasons why that can happen. But one of them can also be because you don't have enough oxygen in the soil, it's too compacted. So the more tillage you do, the more you just physically break these apart.

So we talk about what kind of tillage can we do that will lessen that? And then cover crops always build structure until it always takes away. So when people tried no-till in the '80s and they said it didn't work, it's like no, we couldn't keep our structure long enough. It took a long time for it to build, but if they added cover crops like they're doing now, that helps that progress go a lot faster. Okay. So instead of waiting four to seven years for a good soil, maybe you're waiting two to four, depends how bad your soil started off.

And you know that having reduced till also has better water infiltration. This one is out of Colorado. You remember Micah Peterson? Sorry, he spoke here a few times and this is some of his data and it's showing... So they strip-till the fall before, so 2001 in the fall. And this one was double disked. When they double disked, it would take in about half an inch of rain in an hour. And if you did strip-till, even in the first year, it was taken in two and a half inches in an hour. What kind of rainfalls are we getting lately? Nice, slow three-day rains, right? No. We're getting the four inches, three inches, two. So our soil can better hold it. Now, that's not saying you get a four-inch rain, even strip-till, can't hold it. Okay. It's not a miracle worker, but it helps with water infiltration the first year.

And main reason is because stalks act like straws and they have a lower bulk density around the base and just wick that water into the soil very quickly. So standing stalks, they help out a lot. Here's just one. Monty had done this out of Iowa State, and so we're showing this one up here as no-till. And what it's showing is how much water infiltrated in inches over time. You want the higher, the better. That means that it could absorb that water. So the very top one here is no-till, then strip-till and then chisel plow. And then you have moldboard plow along with disc rip, but the same. Do you know when he took these numbers? Was it after spring or in the fall when he did the tillage?

I'm guessing he took them in the fall.

Okay. Because I would say your moldboard plow is going to settle before spring and it'd be worse at infiltrating. Over the winter, some of our guys grow sugar beets and so they'll have no residue out there and it's compacted because they have to track a huge portion of the field. And so it's very flat going into winter. And I will actually recommend that they do some chisel plow just to chunk it up a little because then it can trap the snow, trap the rain, try to make the best out of... Root crops are a little difficult for the soil, but we're finding new ways to do it. So this one's silage. This would be an awesome place to put in a cover crop.

So we're going to look at the tillage depth and aggressiveness, but mainly I'm just going to talk about strip-till, but we'll talk about shanks and coulters. There's diseases that soil born that you bounce the raindrops and they throw soil back onto the plant. Raindrop impact can move on a flat surface. Soil particles three feet, and if you're on a slope, it can move them downslope five feet. So it could be very detrimental. And the way that you get all those fine particles is by tillage. The more tillage you do, the more you get those fine particles. And clay, an individual particle of clay is actually microscopic. So it's just gone. It moves with water and air so easily. If you have those days, it's been windy for a couple of days and you have a really gray sky. Well, okay, gray where we have more carbon, you might just have a tan sky, I don't know. And it's not smoky from the fires up north and stuff. That's your clay. And it can move thousands of miles. Your sand and silts bounce more along the ground and make it to the ditch.

So we're looking at starting with a soil that had 4.5% organic matter and it was kept in grass and then no-till, even doing no-till, you're still losing some of your organic matter, deep tillage even more. And moldboard plow really does it. So you know that your carbon in your residue is about 45, 50% carbon. When you have dried down stalks, there's about 45% carbon in there. And your organic matter, like we said, is about 58% carbon. So farmers have said, "But if I till it in, I'm putting it right where it needs to be to build organic matter. I'm putting it right there."

And that intuitively does make sense. It's like, "Well, yeah." But in our soil, in one cup of soil you can have, oh, the numbers range everywhere, but let's just use 7 billion microbes, even up to 10 and more if it's productive soil. And they all eat carbon, they love carbon, they love donuts just like we do or I do. And what happens is they intercept it. So they take that carbon and they respire it off as CO2, just like we're doing right now. So now you're taking your carbon and turning it into a gas, and what happens to a gas in the soil? It just goes back to the atmosphere. And when you till, even more so, the more till the more that burp of CO2 will come off. So they intercept it and don't let it turn into organic matter.

For all the biomass that we put in, only about 1% makes it to organic matter. So if you listen to a soil scientist and they act like they don't care about crop yield, oh, that should not be true because if you have a 300 bushel crop versus 150 bushel crop, think of all the carbon that you're adding to the system. So much more. The bigger the plants are, the more carbon they're giving. In Minnesota, soybeans don't give enough carbon to keep the carbon organic matter levels stable, but you do them in rotation and they also have some other benefits to them. Like one guy said you can't make them yield anymore and you also can't kill them very easy either. So we've tried, unless you have soybean cyst nematode, that's a whole different thing.

So yeah, organic matter, and this is what I'm talking about. Here, you have an aggregate and it has root hairs and all sorts of things. The green is going to be your organic matter. The blue is water, you have sand, silt, clay in there and the microbes can't get in there. And then you do tillage and now it's opened up and your bacteria are happy. But again, you're tearing hyphae and things like that. Hyphae, fungi doesn't like it, bacteria does. And then they blow off the CO2 and one of the speakers talked about what do you do with carbon dioxide? I mean you can't smell it, you can't see it. So how do we know it's leaving the soil?

Well, there's this little Mr. GEM box here, it's plexiglass. And right after you, till you slam it down and you kick soil around it so it can't pull any air in. And it can measure how much CO2 is leaving after doing tillage. So if you know Don Rakowski, he's our carbon guru, this is his favorite little machine and he is neat. So Mr. GEM is like mobile research gas emissions machine. I know the M means something else, but we're using machine.

So this is one of Don's. And he looked at moldboard plow, disc harrow, chisel plow and no-till, and how much organic matter was lost as CO2. So we're saying how many pounds of organic matter per acre left in 19 days. Moldboard plow, you lost about 3,800 pounds of organic matter per acre. Disc harrow, 160. Chisel plow, 1500 and then no-till. That's the natural exchange of gases in the soil. And there is a little tillage with no-till, but this is in the fall. Okay, well what's that mean? What does that equate to? The wheat crop only put in 2,800 pounds of carbon. Moldboard plow is taking out more carbon, burning off more carbon in 19 days than what you put in. Now can you plant strictly into moldboard plow? You need one or two passes in the spring, so you still have more tillage to be done. So that number is going to rise even further. And same with chisel and disc harrow, but we have so many more different machines out there now. We don't have just moldboard, disc and no-till. We have lots of other choices.

So this was one that they did at one of my plots. We were corn on corn, we were looking at moldboard plow, disc rip and strip-till, and this is looking at just 24 hours, how much carbon did we lose? And this one's almost 600 pounds, about half of that with disc rip and even a lot less with strip-till. So strip-till, that's why when you see the carbon programs and stuff, strip-till does really well. And in putting the carbon programs away, things that you do to build your organic matter and your soil health will help build carbon. So it's things that you could do for yourself, let alone what the carbon markets are doing. Okay. The reason why we just keep using carbon is so that you've been farming carbon this whole time. We just never regularly called it that.

So let's talk about strip-till. How many of you guys are doing strip-till now? Okay. And how many are thinking about it? Okay. So you two stay and the rest of you, yeah, you're golden. Okay. Strip-till, so what we have on the majority of strip-till machines. You cut the residue, so you're moving this way. Cut the residue. You have residue managers that push it to the side, a shank that comes in and you put down fertilizer behind the shank. Berming disc to capture what the shank is throwing up. And then you have the rolling baskets. If you're doing it in the spring, then a rolling basket is more important. If you're doing it in the fall, I see no benefit to that. Now if you have the coulter system, it's going to line up a little different. And I do have pictures of the coulter systems, but only two or three of them use just coulters. Yeah, only 33% disturbed. And then you plant right back into it. Hopefully you can stay on the berm.

We now have RTK. When I started this we didn't. And one of the farmers I worked with, he says, "With RTK, now even my mom can run it." And I'm like, "Sure, that's not nice. Don't diss your mom like that." And then you could put down your P and K. And Harmon asked a question about fall versus spring. And yeah, we do a lot of it in the fall because we do have a short season. In northern Minnesota we have double-knot beans. You should be laughing going, "What the hell? There's really double-knot?" Yeah, there is. And if you go right on the Canadian border, you can get like 87 day corn. I'm like, "Isn't that like sweet corn or something?" So anyways. Nitrogen, in western Minnesota where we don't have as much rainfall as the eastern side and we have a little bit heavier soils.

We say that you can put down some of your nitrogen in the fall. Can you lose it? Yeah. So trying to get all your nitrogen in the spring is a better bet, but if you want to get down a little bit with a strip tiller, that'd be great that you can. You get your P and K down at that time, any micros and then come back in and use a little with your planter and also use some with Cydrus. Or you can just have it all lined up together. All he needs is a planter at the end and we'd be good. Which there are people in North Dakota that make it a true one pass system. They have the planter at the end, but they have really big fields.

All right, let's burn a quick time out and here's a message about Environmental Tillage Systems, SoilWarriors. SoilWarrior systems help you defend your land and improve soil quality. With a choice of durable models, features and accessories, your SoilWarrior helps you minimize erosion while creating precise nutrient-rich zones. Let us help you defend your land and improve soil quality. Check out SoilWarrior systems online or request a demo today at soilwarrior.com. That's soilwarrior.com. Now back to the conversation.

So it does take a lot less energy. As you saw, there's a lot less carbon loss, a lot less erosion. The shanked ones are best use in the fall. We've had to where we've had and we've worked with lots of different companies and we have had it where we needed to be in the spring. The fall was so wet we couldn't get in, so we had to do spring strip tilling. You're looking at a shank and you're like in the clay loam soil, it's just going to smell like butter. And so we shallowed it up to four inches and we blew instead of the, oh gosh, fertilizer into the back, we blew it in the front and folded it in as we went. And it actually worked out just fine. But if it gets too wet, you don't like that. I also promote this more with my farmers who are much more adverse to having residue out there, trash.

So if they're disc rippers, to have a strip tiller that's pretty aggressive just gives them peace of mind because that berm ends up black. And they're like, "Okay, I understand the black." So it's just a way to help them through. But there's so many different machines and as I go further west and get into the Dakotas, then we look at ones that are near as aggressive. So it's just know, if you're selling them, just know your audience. If you're trying to help people, know your audience and their level of risk. And in Minnesota and also down into Iowa, in the sites of the Dakota, anywhere that the glacier had gone, it leaves rocks. And so you got to make sure you have rock trippers because Orthman did come in, I don't know, 15 years ago, and they don't have rock trippers because they have no rocks that they had to worry about.

So we did a really doozy on one of those shanks. They hit something really buried and not only did it twist it like this, it twisted it this way. I'm like, "Sorry, here's your machine back." Here's the coulter systems. These are the main two. Yeah, I was going to say this might be a little bit older version. And they're always tweaking them and get them to work a little better in different situations. And so the banded one is going to make more of a, or the shanked one are going to make more of an area like this. And these two are going to make an area more like this so it'll be more shallow and it mixes everything in there, whereas the fertilizer in the V-shape will be at the bottom in a band, so it'll be a little bit tighter than... This is like, oh, who's the don guy? His dad Joe Bassett or Jim? Jim. Jim's the dad. Thank you. I haven't seen him for years. He would always say it's his little flower pot. So if you want to kind of think of it that way.

What I like about some of them is that you can drop out the shank and you can put in double coulters. So Earthman is one of them that can do it. Oh geez, who's that one? I thought Hiniker was red. Yeah. No, because Hiniker is always reversed. Hiniker is the one where they... No, you're right. It is reversed. They push away the residue, then they cut it. Instead of cutting it and pushing it, they push it and cut it. So you're right. Thank you. Tell my husband, "I heard Jody say you're right." "No, that wasn't my wife. I'm sorry."

This is one of the farmers that have been doing it since the '80s. Him and his dad out there, he had nobody to talk to in southern Minnesota was strip-till. Yeah. And so that's one of the big concerns about strip-till is not having the people to talk to, but that is changing rapidly and there's these pockets popping up where people are sharing, which is awesome. You want proper setup. I ran a seven strip-till expos and we have anywhere up to 13 strip-till units running the field and one of them looked like that. And it was like, "Are you trying to sell your machine?" Yeah. Should not look like that at all. They should be the nice straight berms. You could get the residue off into the middle and you have a nice black berm in the middle.

And good drainage is beneficial. Well, it helps all water or all tillage systems. But with drainage, big drainage comes big responsibilities. Okay. Benefits of auto steer. This is, if you heard me last night complaining that we started with Starfire II, that's what a lot of our strips look like. And it still yielded the same as disc rip and try to plant on that. We had on the berm, off the berm tests. And the same with Tony Vine, he found about the same thing about a 5% yield decrease in certain years. If you're off the side, you end up in a no-till situation. So you want to stay as close as you can in the middle of the berm. If you have a nice warm year, there's no problem at all. If it's cool and wet, really try to stay in the middle.

And it starts with the combine. So if we have a really wet falling, guys can't get in, they're asking me, "Can I go no-till this year?" I said The first question is do you have a chopping head on your combine? Because if you do, no you cannot. You'll just have this big mat out there that's just going to be soft and wet and they won't get in and then they'll say no-till sucks. And it's like, well, you set it up to fail. So you want something that spreads out the shaft in an even pattern so that your planter can get through it evenly. And then do you chop or not chop? I most of the time say no. The only time that farmers have done it is if they're continuous corn and they're in 22 rows. Because then you have all this residue everywhere.

We did that in one of the guy's fields and the residue was its own berm, in between the 22s, it was way too much. So what we did with that one is we ran over it with vertical till and just got it decomposing a little bit, only ran it a couple inches and then strip tilled into it and it did really, it was very smooth. But trying to plant into residue in the way, especially corn residue, corn on corn. Corn's a diva. He wants everything just right. I'll just call it Mariah. They may leave a matter residue and like I said, an easier flow through the narrower machines, but most of the guys I know if you're in a corn bean rotation in 30 inch rows, you don't need to chop. And actually you want to leave your stock as high as you can, so you do get drying out underneath.

So spring versus fall. Here's the line here, this side is fall, this side is spring strip-till. We like it because again, we don't have very long seasons so we want to get as much done as we can in the fall so we can just worry about planting. So here we're looking at the spring. The one on the right here was done in the spring. This is after planting for both of them. So you can see it's a little bit darker, but it wasn't created until closer to when we were going to plant. The other one on the other side, it's not quite as dark, but it was absorbing sunshine well before we could get out there. As soon as the snow was off, it was getting warmer. Now in Minnesota we freeze and then we're thawed most of the time. But as you go further south, you get more rains before you're in there and yeah, you can have some washout, especially in the beginning before your soil structure is built up and yeah.

So yes, for as many as you guys are out there, that's how many situations you can have out there and it depends and all the nuances. So yes, spring would be the best. You would keep all the soil covered all winter, that would be fantastic. But we're saying that if you need to do some in the fall, it's a lot better than disc ripping in the fall. Okay, so starter or no starter. And we've had studies in, well, I think all the land-grant universities have studies with this. But the main thing that we found in Minnesota is that the more tillage you do, the less you need a starter because it's warming up the soil and you're got the mineralization going, all your microbes are heading out so you don't need the starter quite the same. But to me it's really good insurance on strip-till and definitely on no-till.

So do you need a secondary pass? So one of our farmers, we brought strip-till to him and he looked at that and he goes, "I can't plant in that." I'm like, "Yeah, that sucks. It does." This was like the first year. So we ran over it and we tried some of them just to freshen it up and you just use a little culture cart or little sting cultivators. Have you seen them? I mean they're in every groves that people haven't used them. You cut out them and just leave the three in the middle and just run over that berm 10, 12 miles an hour. You can also go with full vertical till if you want, but then you're messing with the rest of it too. Especially if you have soybean residue, it's really fragile. And if you run over it with vertical till, there won't be a lot left.

Do you see my favorite weed growing in there too? And dandelions are a must. Okay, so they have ones that are just, this is much lighter and you have the rolling basket and you just have two coulters and you can run over it. Again, another one like that with the wavy coulters, this is the buffalo. I call it a paddler. But it was from an old ridge-till farmer. So he tried that. He did use it, but he said it didn't actually cut enough in the berm for him. It poked in it, but it didn't really warm it up much. He wanted a little bit more, so used that. That's the one I was talking about, and just run over it fast. We've tried it with all different things. Rotary hoe, but that's full field. And really it's just whatever you have laying around, you can do it.

Like I said about the combine, you want the chaff to spread out evenly, most of them. So you can a aftermarket one that will help spread it out. I'm on sabbatical right now, I'm learning more about soil compaction. And one of the farmers up there, he does controlled traffic. And he had, and tell me if you've seen these, they're just little wind flaps on the side of his combine back here. So it can tell the wind direction and how fast it's going and it will adjust where it's throwing out the chaff based on wind direction. I'm like, "Cool." So yeah, if you have kids coming into it, you say, "Hey, there's technology here you can go play with. And the drones."

So reduced till and planter settings, it's very important. If you're in the market for a strip tiller, make sure the rep will come out there and help you out. I have pictures of reps sitting on the back end as we're going up and down the field so that they're adjusting and seeing how it works. Don't tell the university, I think it would be some safety crap thing that they wouldn't like. So, anyways. But you do want it. And this is what you want on all your equipment, and I know you can't always do it, but residue, it's important to manage the residue well. Okay, well it won't warm up or dry out.

The one on the right, what kind of tillage do you think was there? Woodward plow, it is wet. You know why? Because it's dry at first because you have all that black soil up and it dries out very quickly that way, but you get a bunch of rains in and it flattens back down. So anybody here work for a co-op and go spraying? Which fields do they go to first after a good rain? They sure don't go to the moldboard and disc ripped, they go to the strip-till, no-till, mulch-till once because they can get into the field because it wicked the water down.

So then we had four years of studies in Fergus Falls, which is only an hour east of Fargo. And then we had Morton Barney, same area, which was about an hour south of Fargo. And we were on sands and a silty, clay and a clay loam. So these are the averages of them and I'm going to do it in pieces. So here we had no-till and we had grad students, so they went out there every week and took all the temperatures and all the moisture data. So you get some heat coming in, you have full residue up there. If you have vertical till, and this is the day of planting. So 42 degrees, which is a little low for corn. Here, vertical till you're chopping it up, you're doing a little bit of tillage and you're getting heat down into the soil.

Here you have chisel plow where again, more tillage and then strip-till. So what strip-till is showing here under the berm, you're letting in as much heat as chisel plow. And I actually have some data that shows you can do the same as moldboard plow depending on the year. And then underneath the residue you're not getting as much heat there. And that was on planting day. Here we got water now. If it says 50%, that's saturated, because the other 50% is sand, silt or clay. So you got 50%, that's 32. So it's going to be wetter and no-till, vertical till 25, which is ideal. Chiseled plow at 19 and under the berm 18, under the residue 29. So not only do you warm up and dry out here where you're going to be planting, but you also have cooler wetter soil on the side for later on in the year. So to me, I love this system, it's win-win.

And our shank systems did very similar to the culture systems on that. So well, but my yields are going to suffer. This is where my research is from. And I'm also going to show you research from North Dakota. So I think we can say that we're the coldest, some of the coldest spots in the whole US. And everybody down here says, "Oh, we're too cold." And they say, "We're too cold." We are, we're too cold and we have clay. So this is what it looks like from some of my field ones. Over 90% is done on farmer fields. We use farmer equipment. Every once in a while I'll have to go find a strip-till machine because not all the farmers have it or strip tillers will not let me come in with a moldboard plow. They're like, "I spent all this time building structure and you're going to come in and destroy it? No, I guess not." So we had the strip-till and chisel plow no-till, vertical till.

And I want to tell you why there are letters and numbers after yield and that you should always look for letters and numbers with anybody who has given you any numbers or yield data or population counts, any of that. Because this field had the same fertilizer, the same hybrid, planted the same day, everything was done the same on this field. And look at the variability. And you've seen it, you get zero to 200 bushel in corn. Have you ever had a field just go 180 all the way across? No, that's your natural variability in the fields. So how do I know if I do strip-till in here, was it due to the natural variability or was it because I did strip-till versus chisel plow? Statistics does that, statistics takes out that noise and gives you what your treatments are doing. So I've had it where there 27 bushel difference and it wasn't statistically significant because in this rep here say my strip-till did better than moldboard plow.

And in this rep they did about the same. And in this rep, moldboard did better than strip-till. And so the computer's going, "You have a lot of variability out there." So no, your tillage didn't do any effects because of the natural variability. So when we're looking at this, always look for numbers or letters or stars. And this means not statistically significant, and you can tell, they're all within a bushel. That's why I love beans. You can do anything to them. So they could be in strip-till, vertical till, chisel plow, disc ripping. And you can still have a lot of residue and still have the same yield. Because that's the big thing, all that residue, it's going to make the soil cool and it will warm up and we'll have a horrible yield. When it comes to beans, they're so nice. So this is the one in Fergus Falls and Bernie, and again you're at 48, 49 for bushels. Okay. This is strip-ill with a shank, a colter, vertical till and chisel plow with a fuel cultivation.

Why did you [inaudible 00:42:43]?

Because it's not fair to no-till. The first four years of no-till are never going to compete or usually don't compete. And yeah, I do have some, I have one that we did do no-till. North Dakota did do no-till. So they looked at no-till, chisel plow and strip-till, and they found out it's 17 site years. Is that 76% of the time no-till yielded the same as everything else. So beans are a really natural place in North Dakota. They're even colder than where I'm in Minnesota. And again, strip-till did a little better than chisel plow. Then we go back to corn because corn, the diva not the darling. And it's funny that 2010 and 12, this was not a bad yield, it was a little low because it was droughty. But there was no significant difference that these ones, and again you can keep more residue.

At the Barney and Fergus Falls site, we did have a difference, this one. The reason why was my fault not the shanked strip-till machine. What happened is I asked for people to bring in the machines. Sometimes they don't get there when I need them. We already put in the other treatments, vertical-till, chisel plow and strip-till with a coulter. Oops. And then it rained, and then we did strip-till with the shank. So I messed up the soil. You don't want to run any shank through wet soil. It doesn't do well. And it actually lowered it enough that it affected the average. But every other year, they all did the same. So really aggressive tillage versus medium tillage versus light tillage, but full field. And what they found in North Dakota in a couple of spots over into Minnesota, 44% of the time, no-till corn did fine. It out-yielded or yielded the same as the other two. Strip-till was 44% of the time and chisel-plow 12% and that's 18 site years there.

So what we found is mainly the weather has more an effect than our tillage. I don't know if you know this, but you know how there's journal articles where people write up their scientific research and they submit it. If it came back not statistically significant, they wouldn't publish it. So you had all this research that I can't publish and neither can other people who are doing it because it wasn't statistically significant, which is significant. There was no difference. That was awesome. They now have changed it where you can do that, but only in the last few years. So I couldn't find any tillage data to back up what I was seeing unless they showed differences and it was like, which wasn't many.

Okay, so this one was 13 site years and the farthest north one was the middle of Minnesota and the rest of them were all in the southern portion. This we went in first year and either did no-till, strip-till field cultivation in the spring and chisel-plow in the fall with the field cultivation in the spring. So we had the whole range. In 2004, no-till was significantly lower yield than the other three. The other three were the same statistically. So no-till did take a little ding there. But in 2005 they were all the same.

Take out the field variability. The reason why 2004 was cold and wet, 2005 was an awesome year. And that's the first year no-till. So it's not really setting it up to be very successful. And the other reason I don't do no-till is because none of the farmers want to see it. So you like tillage? Oh yeah, that's where the small child was. Look, this is the Fargo Plays. They're just incredible and they're not fun to farm. So remember it's doing tillage for you much deeper than you can pull a machine. So the costs, I've always tried to find costs for this and again, as many people are out there, that's how much different equipment there is and shapes of fields and everything else. And I was using the Iowa custom rate survey, but then I was thinking about it and go, "That's only what farmers are charging other farmers. That's not the actual cost, it's what they can charge and they feel is a good rate."

And so you would see moldboard plow, which takes a long time, more fuel, would be the same price to do for somebody as a chisel plow. I'm like, "But a chisel plow, you can go over more acres faster," but it's just what the market will do. That's what they're charging. So I didn't want to use those because those aren't real numbers. Okay they are, you know what I mean. So I did Illinois's numbers and they assumed 350 diesel, 21 labor. And I also liked how they had everything just really spelled out. It's for a 1400 acre farm. It's a new tractor and a new implement. We all have that, right? So yes, you own your chisel plow, you've had it longer, you may not have any money on it, but we're using everything brand new just so that we can have the same basis and not using a chopping head or at least not the additional cost.

And this is where you can get this one. They do it every year if you want to. You probably can't see that in the back, but it's the farm business management, University of Illinois Extension, and this one's September 23. So the new one should be coming out soon. Okay. So we'll go through different ones, but just so you don't have too many numbers at once, no-till you don't have an implement tillage, but you do need a better planter. You need something with residue managers to get that residue out of the way. So it costs a little bit more than the conventional planter. So it costs about $23 to do these two things here. And you're using about half a gallon per acre of fuel. Over a thousand acres because nobody farms just an acre. Well, okay, we got a lot of small farms moving into Minnesota, so I got to be careful of that one.

Then one passive fuel cultivation costs almost $15. You can use a regular combine on it, excuse me, planter, you don't need to move the residue away. And so the total cost is $35 and it uses about a gallon. And the price of the fuel is in that price. I just wanted you to see how much fuel you using separately. Then one passive speed disc is $18.20. Again, you can use a regular planter and so you're looking at 39,000, 40,000 for a thousand acres. And then one passive strip-till, here you're putting down your fertilizer at the same time, but this is soybeans, so you're not really putting down much and you're using 1.2 gallons. Now remember, soybeans yielded just as good with no-till, 75% of the time. So I would go with no-till on this one and you would save a little bit of money.

Now, the tillage costs here, the fuel use for a thousand acres is 500 to 1200 gallons per a thousand acres or tillage, I'm sorry, yeah, tillage fuel use. Sorry, I just made this chart up. And then they have surveys out there that the younger farmers are, they value time a lot more than the older farmers. They want time with their family. We'll see the older farmers are like, "No, I'm going out. I will go moldboard plow because I don't want to be home." So they're showing this is how many hours one field cultivation pass and planting will take or just field cultivation. Just the tillage takes 23 hours to get that done. And strip-till will take you 32 hours. So you save some time and fuel and money. And then for corn, so you're looking at strip-till again, putting down the fertilizer with the strip tiller, not doing the broadcast and incorporate.

And then you do need the better planter again. So over a thousand acres. Chisel plow with a fuel cultivation, it's going to cost more. But you have the cheaper planter and disc ripping field cultivation. And the total cost and you're looking at your fuel use, it's a lot more fuel here. So one of the farmers said that he had the co-op come to his yard and say, "Who else are you using for your fuel?" And he said, "I'm not." He went to strip-till and he used half the fuel he used and they thought he was cheating on him. It's very romantic relationship. That's not fair to the farmer. Fall tilly, jakers are hours, 23 versus 13, yeah. And you do have to slow down, disc ripper is faster than a strip tiller, but now to come back in with a fuel cultivator and you got the spring hours on it too. Okay.

So the total here is... Why I got to look at my numbers again. I know this part is right. Have you ever gotten older and just went "Where's your brain?" And my kids say that all the time. So it takes 44 hours to do your strip-till in the fall here. So that's all you're doing. Or put it to spring, it's still 44 hours. And here you have, it's taking you 79 hours. So almost double. And here it's definitely double. I have a wrong number in here. I'm wondering if those two should be switched. Yes, dagnabbit. Okay. Is it on film? Switch those numbers don't use that and say, "Look what Jodi did. Yeah, Jody messed up."

Okay, so let's look at, for soybeans, 75, 80% of the time no-till yields the same as shallow tillage. And if you do no-till over those thousand acres versus shallow tillage or strip-till, you're saving 12,000 to $26,000 in tillage costs. You're saving 500 to 700 gallons of fuel, which come out to that cost, which is included in the top number. I just pulled it out so you can see just what the fuel part was. And then 23 to 32 hours of time at $21 an hour. And that's a huge complaint farmers have is you can't find enough help. So this would help, you'd have less people having to do tillage. For corn, 92% of this time, strip-till yields the same as dis rip or chisel plow and no till sometimes. So tell me the weather, I'll tell you how to farm.

Strip-till savings over a thousand acres. So tillage or saving by doing strip-till over the more aggressive ones, 15 to $36,000. That's it. Anywhere from 500 to 2000 gallons of fuel. And then it's also saving a lot of time. Give it 21 hours. So you're saving having to pay somebody 740 or $1,300. So it really does help out. And then saving your soil is priceless. But it's only for row crops. When somebody asked the speaker what are some of the challenges with strip-till, it's only for row crops. You don't do it for wheat or small grains or flax or canola, not everyone can do it. Our average age of our farmer in Minnesota is 56 and it's getting older. And if they don't have kids to pass it on to, are they going to go buy a $250,000 machine to try out strip-till? No. And I wouldn't expect them to.

But then I also have another talk on how to just reduce tillage even with your chisel plow. Perennial weed shifts, again, get used to dandelions or learn how to kill them. And then your neighbors, talk from the neighbors, which is not as bad as it was 20, 30 years ago. Now they're just looking going, "We'll see." So structure does take time to change and know your fields because different machines are aggressive and some are more aggressive than others. So if you're in an area where you don't get a lot of rainfall, you probably want the strip tillers that aren't very aggressive. Your crop rotation is going to make a difference on what machine you're going to want. Soil type, topography, when you're going to do your work, spring versus fall, again, you'll want the cultures in the spring. And mainly we totally overestimated the importance of tillage.

Tillage was everything before it took care of weeds and diseases. But now we have chemicals for that. We have a lot of IPM to do that and it takes a little more management, but it's definitely doable and it costs money. And if you want to replace that soil, it costs money, it increases your erosion. But if you want to pay for black soil to go back onto your field, that's $25 per ton. So think about our average loss is five ton per acre is moving. So that's our normal. So we're going to try to get below that so it costs money. And if you want, I have a tillage guide and a soil organic matter does matter guide if you want to go look those up.

Big thanks to Jodi DeJong-Hughes and all the work she's done over the years as regional educator with the University of Minnesota Extension to shine the light on strip-till. Also, thanks to our sponsor, Environmental Tillage Systems for making this podcast series possible. And as always, for all things strip-till, head to striptillfarmer.com. I'm Noah Newman, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you soon.