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On this edition of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Environmental Tillage Systems, we catch up with the “Grandfather of Strip-Till” Rich Follmer.

While growers were moving toward no-tilled soybeans in a big way during the 1980s and ‘90s, no-tilled corn acres remained somewhat flat. Many farmers feared they would have problems trying to no-till into cold, wet ground covered with residue.  

As a result, strip-till soon emerged as a compromise. Rich Follmer became an early innovator in the strip-till space after building a homemade 12-row strip-till bar in the late ‘80s for a friend. As the head of Progressive Farm Products, based in Hudson, Illinois at the time, Follmer perfected the units and put them into production a few years later. 

Strip-Till Farmer editor Frank Lessiter talks with Strip-Till Farmer Hall of Famer Rich Follmer about building his first toolbar, why he started making strips in the fall, his thoughts on using cover crops with strip-till, the future of the strip-till industry and much more. 

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

Hey, great to have you with us for another edition of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Environmental Tillage Systems. We'll have more on their SoilWarrior systems later in the podcast, but today we're revisiting a conversation with the grandfather of strip-till, Rich Follmer. While growers were moving toward no-tilled soybeans in a big way during the 1980s and 1990s, no-tilled corn acres remain somewhat flat. Many farmers feared they would have problems trying to no-till into cold, wet ground covered with residue. So as a result, strip-till soon emerged as a compromise. 

Rich Follmer became an early innovator in the strip-till space after building a homemade 12-row strip-till bar in the late '80s for a friend. As the head of Progressive Farm Products based in Hudson, Illinois at the time. Follmer perfected the units and put them into production, just a few years later. So today, Strip-Till Farmer editor, Frank Lessiter talks with strip-till farmer Hall of Famer, Rich Follmer about building his first toolbar, why he started making strips in the fall, his thoughts on using cover crops with strip-till. The future of the industry and much, much more. Let's jump right in. Here's Frank and Rich.

Well, I think you're pretty much the grandfather of strip-till and got it developed, but let's start a little earlier. Did you grow up in Illinois on a farm or what?

Yep. I live near Bloomington-Normal now, but I grew up about 35 miles north of here at Graymont, Illinois. Graymont, Flanagan area and grew up on a farm. We had the cattle and hogs and the corn beans and after I got out of college, which I went to college at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal and had an opportunity to work for a guy. Paul Bates was his name, and when Paul retired from farming, I had an opportunity to move back here to farm his farm. And so I've been here 46 crops just north of Bloomington-Normal, a little town called Hudson.

Sure. So how are you farming? What tillage you using?

Well, a little bit of everything. We got no-till. We got no-till beans. We use some strip-till and we even do some tillage with the strips first and then the tillage following it. We've got all kinds of ways, depending on the farm and the landowner.

Right. So how many acres are you farming?

A little over 2,500.

Oh, wow. Good for you. Now, what happened after you got back farming and lead me into the Progressive Product Company?

Well, with the Progressive Company, I got into manufacturing quite by accident. I built a tillage system that was a caddy with three rows of Danish tines in 1980 and I built that system on our farm to carry a three point 20 foot soybean drill. And so we were going to till the ground and drill the beans all at the same time and people saw what I was building, they liked it. And the neighbors would come. Pretty soon I was selling them locally and that's what started the business of Progressive Farm Products was that one item. 

The thing that really got Progressive going was in '87, I designed what we called the twin frame sprayer. It was a wheel boom sprayer that looked much like a fuel cultivator frame, followed the ground and kept all the nozzles at the proper height and that. That was really the thing that took the company and got it really going. We sold hundreds and hundreds of those all over the country. Didn't get into the strip-till part until about ... I started working on that project about '88.

Let's talk about that. What got you into thinking about what eventually got called strip-till?

Well, we didn't know what else to call it, but a friend of mine was coming down west of Springfield and he'd been no-tilling a couple of years and he was frustrated with the yields. They just weren't ... He had some conventional and some no-till and there was horrible difference. And he says, "Man." He said, "I got to come up and pick your brain and see if we can come up with something to save this. I want to get rid of the field cultivator, but I don't know what to do. I've tried to put some coulters on the planter and couldn't get the ground warmed up and dried out quick enough." You're putting the coulters on a planter, a couple coulters and he says six-tenths of a second later, "You're planting the seed and you don't get a lot of warming and drying."

He had it all figured out, but he just didn't know what ... I want to know what you want to do. And so I said, "Well, we need to work on this a while and think a little bit about it." So I started thinking about it and a month or so later we got back together and I said, "Well, I'll tell you what. We need to till the ground and just enough to plant on. Maybe 8 or 10 inches wide. You leave the rest of the soil undisturbed and now you've got the best of both worlds." You'll have your tillage, you'll have your no-till, have your conservation, it'll be dry in that strip. Well, I've already done that. I said, "No, we're not going to do that on a planter, we're not going to do that. We're going to do it on a separate trip. I already don't want to do that." I said, "Well, if you're asking how to improve it, that's the only answer I got."

So anyway, we build a bar, a homemade bar, 12-row and built some crude row units at first to clean a path and later we perfected them before we went into actual production in '92 and give him a few years to test it. And it worked pretty well. He got a black strip, he would go out and lay that out ahead of time and then a couple days later when he was ready to plant the ground was warmer and drier and he was happy. So then we thought maybe we hit a home run there. So we had to figure out what to call it and the only thing we could think of was strip-till.

Right. Well, you made it work. I would think that one of the first visits I made to you was probably in the late '80s to see what you were going. You weren't in the strip-till yet at that time, but apparently you were fooling around with it a little. But I remember we started the National No-Tillage Conference in '93 and a few years later we had you speak about strip-till and I remember-

Yep, about '95, maybe.

I think I remember after you closed off your speech that you spent a long time out in the hallway talking to a bunch of our farmers.

I remember that. I had this little speech, or I think I was the last one on the agenda on a Saturday morning, If I remember right, and then we went outside and I was checking out to come back home and a couple people come up and started talking to me and asking me questions. And the next thing I know we have a whole group of people standing around and I'd answer them and somebody else would've another one, and pretty soon ... I said, "Hey, I got to go home. We've been standing out here for three and a half hours talking." And boy, everybody wanted my phone number, wanted this, wanted that. And of course, that started people thinking about it because I think guys were frustrated with the cold and the damp soil under the residue and that was just a method to get the ground dried out a little bit without full width tillage because we didn't want to do full width. Trying to conserve soil and everything. I was wore out. That was the harder part than speaking for 20 or 25 minutes, was answering all of those questions.

Yeah. A few years later in Des Moines we had [inaudible 00:07:26], I think from the University of Maryland talking about wheat, and he was the last speaker on Saturday morning like you were. And he ended up missing his airplane flight because of all-

Oh, my goodness.

At least you were driving, you could leave when you needed to.

At least I was driving, I was just tired. That was worse than working all day, answering all those questions. And there was a lot of guys had some really, really good questions. I remember a guy ... Correct me if I'm wrong on his name, I think his name is Dan Towery.

Sure.

He was with the Conservation Tillage something or other at at the time.

Yeah, Conservation Technology.

Yeah, he stood there pretty much all of that and was listening to it very intently and I remember that he asked me a couple questions and then finally when the crowd broke up, he talked to me off to the side a couple minutes. He was very interested in the questions that the people were asking. I don't know if he cared about my answers, but he liked the questions.

Yeah. What was the immediate response from strip-till? Did you see higher yields? Did you get the plant earlier or what?

Well, both because the guys with the straight no-till, we were looking at that thing and we'd have to wait. Now here's the other guys running with strip-till cultivators and whatever else and they're running and planting and we're waiting three, four more days before we even attempt to do that. And I'm talking no-till corn into bean stubble. And it was cold and damp underneath that bean residue and at the time we were doing an average job of spreading the pods out behind the combine in the fall. We could've done better, but things got better as time went on with how we handled residue. 

It just was cold and wet under there and we discovered that if you just went out and opened the ground up and 8 or 10 inches is all you needed, and then the ground was nice and warm and dry. What I had seen without the strip, where we did it side by side. I noticed that a couple days after you planted without the strip that one year. It was a little bit damp and about the time you think you could run, then you get another little shower and it was one of them springs. It was a little damp, but where the strip had run or the people with the cultivators, they had a dry seedbed that was warm and dry and planted fine and had good stands.

The straight no-till that time, it was planted and it looked good when it went in and got planted and the coulter opened the ground and everything. The problem is that two days later when the ground started to dry out the ... I called it scrolling, where you'd squeeze the seed trench shut, it started to open back up from the drying and shrinking of the soil and you could actually see the kernels. That's not good. That really got me thinking there that this strip-till might be a very important way to do no-till. The no-till purist doesn't like to hear that, but it's a compromise between that and full width tillage, I should say.

So that scrolling really bothered me because you'd lost the seed soil contact, and again I will clarify, it was a wetter than usual spring, but the no-till suffered under that situation. But where the strip was run ... I remember Cliff Roberts coined the phrase that he allowed me to use. His phrase was, "You're fooling the corn into thinking a field cultivator went by."

That's pretty good. So the idea of building berms in the fall, did you have that right from the start or were you building them in the spring or what?

We started out building them in the fall, if we had time we could get it out of the way, so we didn't have to do it in the spring, when we're thinking about spraying and planting and all that other stuff. But I learned a lesson there too. On a couple of our fields, we had some rolling ground west of where our base is here and we did them in the fall and we got a whole lot of rain that December, after that fall. And it washed some pretty deep gullies down the knife track where the strips were laid. And so we started being careful which farm we did it and which farm we didn't.

We would do the flat ground, you could do it in the fall, but any rolling ground or that had some hills in it, like these couple of fields did. We would only do those in the spring before we planted and we were using a combination of liquid 28% nitrogen and PMK all put down in the strip the same time. With 28 we could get along doing that very well in the spring and planting a couple of days later. And hydrous, I would've been a little more nervous in the spring planting, so close behind it, but being as we were 28% nitrogen, it worked good in the spring. It just took another day or two to do it.

What yield response did you get early on?

That was a shocker because the first couple years when we did it, we were over 20 bushel to the acre.

Wow.

Of course, all that does is gets you more excited all the time when you start coming out with those results right out of the chute. But I remember my buddy that I started to design this whole thing for there. He was seeing yields anywhere from 7 to 10 to 12 in the Springfield area. He was seeing pretty good yields in, he said. "It's well worth it." And it was a homemade unit. It didn't take much to put it together, but it solved what he wanted to do and that's what got us all going in that direction.

Yeah. Well, you talked about no-till and the pure no-till and all, if you have 50 no-tillers in the room and you ask them what their system is, there's probably 25 or 30 different systems that they're doing.

Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

The same thing is true of strip-tills. This guy's doing something, the next guy's not doing it at all. Somebody believes, I want to build all my berms in the spring, others want to build them all in the fall. It's amazing when we survey these people, what the split is between fall and spring berms and I don't have the data right in front of me, but there's more spring berms than I would've thought they were. But then probably some of it is people didn't get them built in the fall.

Well, and I noticed too ... What I've seen the last couple years, there's a couple companies over east of us here, where guys have put their strips on in the fall, but then they got a spring freshener tool, so to speak, where they go back and they just freshen the strip up in the spring, just maybe some clods or whatever. Did winter over good. And it makes it nice and fine and makes a good seedbed to plant in. 

I will say this, I learned over the years and doing it on our own farm, the strip-till, that we had to be very careful that we could keep that planter on top of that strip because if you ... On the side of a hill or something and you would get off of it just an inch or two, those corn plants, you could see them very easily. Those corn plants really showed up as stunted, compared to the ones that were in the strip itself in the black strip of soil. A big difference in how the plants looked and how they emerged. Those would not come up as quick and when they did, they were straggly. Somebody said, a corn plant that comes up three days later is a weed. Well, I don't know about that, but that's what they look like.

So you want all them up at the same time, as you well know, you want to get the stand-up and get it off to a good start. But I did notice ... That was another thing that pointed out to myself that "Wow, there's a difference right there." Because the no-till is what was happening a couple inches off center compared to the tilled, when you got the planter back on center and you could walk through the field and see that it. It stuck out like a sore thumb, as somebody said. It really was noticeable. So then the key was to trying to keep the unit on, try to keep the planter on the strip as best that you could.

GPS probably had as much to do with the expansion of strip-till than anything because you could keep the planter on that strip.

Yeah, it helped a lot. It helped a lot. And then now with the ability ... If you can steer the planter with GPS as well, now you can duplicate it even more accurately with RTK, you can steer it to the dead center of the strip every time on a side of a hill or any situation. If the planter can steer itself, which is the new thing, you've got it nailed down. Because what we are running into with 16-row strip-till bar and running a 24-row planter the last couple of years, that's really difficult to do without some way to guide the strip bar. On flat ground it works great, but on the hillside, if say the strip bar wants to drift a little bit, the planter maybe wants to drift differently. It's harder to keep them on there when they don't ... I like it to match as best you can. The planter and the strip bar in configuration.

It makes it a little easier.

Yes sir. It does. It really does.

Are you using cover crops in your operation?

We have some. We haven't got very much yet, but we're looking at it. We've tried it. Two years, we've done some. And what I did notice about those and ... What started out is we started doing the cover crop because we were going to, so to speak, get paid for it. Well, that didn't really work out the way we had hoped to, but nonetheless we put them out anyway. It was rye, cereal rye, and in that cereal rye we went and planted the first year two years ago. In 2019. We planted cereal rye in the fall with our fertilizer. We just spread it with a fertilizer floater truck and the rye come up and it grew and it looked really good. 

We went into spring and planted that rye. It was five feet tall and didn't burn it down. We didn't use any chemical to burn it down. We planted it tall and then knocked it down, see, and then the thing was amazing about it, Frank, that really opened my eyes to the cover crop was the fact that we didn't spray any chemical on that farm all summer, on those soybeans. We had no pre-plant chemical and we had no post-applied chemical and we had no weeds. No waterhemp. No palmer, none of those nasty ones. We had no weeds at all. Just a little strip around the waterway, a few button weeds, butter plant or velvet leaf, but no waterhemp, not one plant in the first 80 acre field that we did it on. I was shocked.

So on this berm with cover crops, so with the strip-till unit, you were able to get the rye off the berm?

We actually planted that directly into the rye. There was no strips in that field.

Okay, got you. Okay.

Yeah, I better clarify that. That was planted directly into the rye, no-tilled into the rye with no strips in that situation. 

Okay. Can a strip-tiller make cover crops work?

Yes, I think so. Yeah. Yeah, I got friends that are doing it. We're going to more and more of that on our farm too. I've just been watching, carefully seeing what people are doing, but we've got a couple friends west of us that are doing it and they're doing all kinds of things. They got rye, they got turnips, they got radishes, they've got everything. And they're stripping into that seedbed to plant. Yes, sir. 

Yeah. So the row unit will get the rye off to the strip, right?

Yes. 

Right.

Yes, yes.

We got a few people building little wider berms and then planting like twin-row corn on it. Will that work?

If you can get the strip wide enough, it is. I tried to build a strip bar several years ago, right before I sold my business. I tried to build one for a guy out in Iowa. It had a Great Plains twin-row planter and he wanted an extra wide strip, so we built him a special row unit, but even then he was on contours and it made it hard to stay on with two rows. One's hard enough, but two twin-rows made it a little harder. They were eight inches apart, the twin-rows, on each row unit, eight inches apart. And he had a little trouble. One would be on, one would be off. It needed to be somehow improved. But we didn't go too much farther on it.

We didn't see a lot of move to the twin-row planter, so we didn't make it an actual production product. It didn't go into manufacturing. It was more for prototype testing.

Right. Well, you're one of these farmers who built some units in the farm shop and ended up putting together a pretty good business and expanded it. But we don't seem to see many of these farmer shop ideas turning into companies anymore, like happened with you in the 1980s and a bunch of others. Howard Martin was another one that did this, there was a number of them. We seem to be past the farm shop ideas coming to market these days.

Yeah, I used to enjoy in a lot of the different farm magazines, the publications back in a couple decades ago. They would always show the farmer build ideas, where a guy build his own planter or build his own whatever. Sprayer, what have you. And some of those guys were really fun to read what they did and that. But nowadays, you don't see much of that stuff in publications because there's more other subjects to cover. It's a lost art because I wonder today, "Are farmers still building a lot of their own things?" We've lost track of that. When I looked through your book you sent me, that you wrote, you got a lot of farmer ideas in there. A lot of pictures. And it was neat what guys had worked on to come up with just to try to make it easier to farm. And some of those guys out there have some great ideas.

Well, in those early days, people weren't happy with the planters or the drills that were on the market, so they were more than willing to try something. I still remember we did a story, and you probably saw it too, the guy out of Kansas, took an old combine and turned it into a no-till planter.

He had the planter mounted on the front of it, didn't he?

Exactly. Right.

Did it that way. Yeah, I think I remember that.

Yeah. Yeah. So are you no-tilling any corn or you strictly strip-till?

Yeah. We're not no-tilling any corn right now. We're no-tilling the beans, but we're not no-tilling any of the corn. We've pretty much stayed ... If you can deal with just a little bit of a strip-tillage or a tillage operation, it still looks like the best way for corn to me. I may be wrong, Frank, but I'm not convinced that we can still get the good corn yields just going out and planting like before. You still need a little bit of soil work. And that's my opinion. I'm still of the belief that you need to do that a little bit. I got a number of friends over here east of Bloomington that no-till, they no-till straight into rye. I'm a little nervous about doing that with corn into rye. But anyway, they're doing it.

The stands are sometimes really good and sometimes not so. I was of the conclusion that I didn't want any not sos, it had to be as good as I could do all the time, not just sometimes. And so I've been reluctant to do that in the corn. But we do it in the beans. Well, one farm in general up north of us a few miles, where that particular farm you have to chisel plow the corn stalks and things like that, which is against our program, but we do it anyway because it's what's required on the farm. So we can say we got a little bit of every kind of way of farming right now, but I do like the no-till beans. We've had very good success in doing them. I don't see any yield advantage of working the ground to plant beans at all.

Right.

Not at all.

So on your farm, what would you say the yield advantage is for strip-till over no-till corn?

I would still say you can get 20 to 25 bushel. I'll still make that statement today. I've had guys in the past that I've dealt with that's been almost 40 bushel to the acre, where they've tried some tillage. I told a story years ago about a guy that didn't believe me about the strip-till and he'd been no-tilling for 15 years and he said, "My yields are just as good as anybody." And I said, "Well, good for you. I don't know your farm." I just said that, "Have you ever tried to till a little bit, borrow neighbor's field cultivator and just work a couple rounds in the middle of a field? No, I'm not going to do that. And I said, "Well, I just was wanting you to do it for curiosity because you've had a lot of no-till history and then you could tell me what it yielded."

Well, he was mad at me for suggesting it, but anyway, he come back and a year later and found me. I was at Louisville exhibiting. The guy come up to me and I thought, "Oh, boy. I remember this guy. I'm going to really get chewed on, see?" And he come up to me and he shook my hand and I said, "How you doing?" And he said, "You remember me?" And I said, "I do." He said, "I owe you an apology." And I thought, "Wow, that sounds good. That sounds real good. Okay. What did I do." Well, he said, "I did what you said to prove you wrong. I'm going to prove you wrong and then I'm going to come back and tell you." Well, he said, "I'm going to tell you what, I'm going to confess to you that my corn was 38 bushel better, where I made those two rounds with the neighbor's cultivator compared to just the pure no-till." He said, "Where's my closest dealer to buy a strip-till bar?" And I'll never forget that story.

Right. So what's going to happen with strip-till? Is it going to continue to grow? Is it going to cut into minimum till acres or no-till acres or what?

Well, I think it's going to continue to grow. There's a bunch of people coming out ... Now I'm out of the manufacturing side now, but there's a bunch of people coming out with some new row units and some new ways to do it. As in anything, technology gets better as the time goes on, but we got a young company over here just 10 miles to the west of us that's developing a strip-till row unit, right as we speak. And it's a nice looking unit. It's got a lot of adjustment. I don't know the cost of the row, but I know that they've got a lot of features on it.

They're just starting into it. So obviously they feel there's some promise into what they're doing because they wouldn't have invested into it if they didn't think they was a future. And so I think based on watching these guys come up with new equipment. I think it's here to stay yet. I think it's probably going to rob acres from both sides.

Well what's interesting with strip-till, I mean with no-till, you basically go out and buy a planter pretty much with most attachments on it. Strip-till you buy a toolbar and you can put on it anything you want.

Yep.

A farmer can try anything and he doesn't get stuck with what's coming on the unit to start with.

Yeah. Yeah, very true.

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.

Back in 2009 we did an article with you called 11 Things You've Learned About Strip-Till. Incidentally, I wanted to point out that you're also one of our No-Till Innovator award winners, which you received back in 2009.

I got that painting hanging on the wall here.

All right. Right, right. That's great. That's great.

That was presented to me that evening.

And well deserved.

Thank you.

Let me back up a minute. You sold off the company in what year?

Two-thousand-ten.

Right. What led you to do that?

Well, it's one of those things, where you start thinking about you're going to pass it down.

Right. Exactly.

And I talked to my son about, did he want to run the business and carry it on and keep it going. If he does, fine. Well, he said, "Really what I want to do is just farm." There's a lot of headaches in farming and manufacturing all at the same time. And he said, "I guess dad, I don't want to go through what I see you go through, you're under a lot of pressure all the time." Trying to wear two hats, so to speak. And he said, "I'd just rather farm." Well, that pretty well answered my question. So I said, "I am going to set out to sell the business. I don't have to sell it today. I'm going to be patient to sell it."

So that conversation took place in 2003, Frank, and it didn't get sold until 2010. It took me seven years to get the right deal to sell it, seven years. So it didn't just happen overnight. I had everybody you can think of come and looked at me with great interest from the John Deere's of the world to small manufacturers, shortliners, other shortliners. Everybody looked at it because they were looking at all the things we were doing with fertilizer application. Strip-till was a big deal. They were looking, wanting to buy the strip-till and then of course, at that point we'd stopped building sprayers. So that was no longer in the deal. It was fertilizer application and strip-till.

And so it took seven years to get the right deal put together. So that's why I sold it because if nobody can take it over, I decided it's better to try to sell it while I'm alive than to have something happen and then my wife have to try to do it.

Right, right.

And it's better to take care of things when you still are in charge.

So you sold it out to a European company and which I can never pronounce the name correctly.

Okay. It's Kongskilde. Kongskilde was an interesting company. They had a business on the south end of Bloomington-Normal that was in the industrial part, not in the ag part. They're in two different divisions in the world and they were interested in my location, which according to them was the center of the Corn Belt. We got three interstates meat here at Bloomington. If you draw an oval around the Corn Belt from Nebraska to Ohio, we're in the middle. And from Missouri to Minnesota, we're in the middle of that Corn Belt they called it. And they were very interested in it for many reasons. They wanted to strip-till, they wanted to get into that. They were trying to get into it in Europe and also ...

Here's the funniest one, I thought. They wanted a connection to sell equipment into Russia and the Ukraine and the Czech Republic. Now they're from Europe and they couldn't get into those countries, but I was already selling equipment in them and that was amazing because I thought, "Wow, they're a lot closer than we are." Anyway, we were doing it. And they wanted that connection because We already had it in those countries of selling. We sold strip-till equipment, liquid side dress equipment over there. And so that was one of the things that made them look pretty hard at it.

And like I said, all these other companies through that seven years looked, but these guys come in and they said, "We think we want this company." And so we arrived at a price. We didn't even negotiate. That was the one that shocked me. They paid what I asked. Frank, long story short, I had to work for them for a couple years after that and then I could retire. Well, I ended up working four years. I was head of engineering and then they retired. My wife and I, both stayed there until '14, and we retired and now we just farm with my son. 

Now the business, Kongskilde has sold it off to Brandt Industries out of Canada, the big blue stuff, Brandt know the grain handling and stuff. That's the company. A family owned business, very nice people. I still do some things with those guys in engineering ideas because they're only two miles from my shop here. We've got a great relationship with the Brandt folks and they've added onto the factory and doubled it and wanting to do more. So I'm glad that the business is still running. It's just changed names twice.

Yeah. Well, that's like driving by there the last 20 years and I should have stopped many more times than when we did, but you're always in a hurry going to St. Louis or something, but I was always amazed at how much you were expanding and building on every year. So we knew you were doing okay.

Yes. Yep. We were pretty blessed. 

Right. Now, one of the jokes about this company buying you out, not really a joke, but you see them at something like the National Farm Machinery Show of Farm Progress Show and they'll have a plow on their lot. A moldboard plow.

Yes. Yes. I always laughed about that when they brought one here one time to the factory, it was a rollover plow, about a seven bottom and it rolled over. I said, "Well, you guys are in the wrong territory to sell those things. Well, we're not going to sell them here. Those are going to the state of New York. Oh, okay." And they sold a lot in Europe, where people were buying them and using them. The rollover plow. No, those were going to New York.

Let's go back to the article we did on you and 11 Things, and I'd like to just walk through each of these and number one is sidewall smearing is not as big a problem in strip-till. Give me a couple comments.

The thing is again, is like we were talking a little bit ago. When you're planting in cold, wet soil with the planter, you're definitely going to get sidewall smearing and you're going to get that scrolling as I called it, when the soil shrinks back, as the sun dries it and warms it. Where with strip-till you've got a tilled situation there that's a warmer dry seedbed when the seedbeds warm and dry, smearing is not an issue. It only is an issue in my opinion when the soil is too wet.

Yeah. Number two was never plant in dual tracks, dual tire tracks.

That's very true. Yep. Because you've got a compaction issue right underneath there. It's hard for the rail unit. Nowadays, they've got hydraulic downforce and things that might offset that a little bit. But then we didn't have that back then, where that planter unit would ride up and you couldn't hold the depth. If you wanted to plant corn at two inches, you couldn't hold it in the wheel tracks. And so the strip-till was another good thing because there was no wheel tracks ever planted in. Like a field cultivator, you got dual tracks wherever the cultivator ran and you can tell when a guy field cultivated a field too wet, those dual tracks from your tractor showed up two months later in the soybeans. It really stuck out. And so with strip-till, you never had to plant in a dual track or wheel track of any kind.

Right. This reminds me of another story I'm going to tell with ridge tillers, there's a lot of no-tillers that used to badmouth ridge till, they didn't see any use for it and now we have strip-till. So what were the ridge tillers doing? They were building on berms or planting on berms. They were doing controlled traffic.

Yes, they were.

They were deep placing some fertilizer and all of a sudden somehow ridge till seems to be the forerunner of strip-till with all these benefits.

Well, when you look at it the way you said, that's exactly what it looks like. The only thing that soured people ... We had a few people around here tried it way back and the only thing that soured them on that was the cultivating, row crop cultivating, where with the strip-till you laid the strip, planted the corn, you were done. You sprayed of course. But see, those guys would spray, but they'd also come back and cultivate sometimes twice because when they cultivated the first time, row crop cultivated, they tore the ridge down next to the plant. The next time they build it back up and that thing. There was a lot of manual cultivating involved in it and that would I guess would be the major difference between strip-till and ridge till. It's more labored intense.

Right. Well, one of the problems was they had livestock and when they should've been cultivating they should've been baling hay.

Exactly. That's a good point. 

Right. We in the '90s did a ridge till newsletter much like No-Till Farmer for four or five years. We were doing okay with it. We weren't getting rich or anything, but we finally gave up on it because I just didn't see how the acreage was going to grow. And of all the mailing lists we've ever used over the years, we got one from one of the ridge till companies and my God, we got 10% of the people that send us money for a subscription. They were so hungry for information. Normally if we get one or two percent off a mailing list, we're happy, but we got close to 10%. 

In fact, I had decided we were going to do a ridge till newsletter and we sent this mailing out, I think just after Thanksgiving. And my idea was, we're going to see how this works and by Christmastime if we get a good response, we'll do this. If we don't, we'll send the money back. Well, by Christmas we had over a 1,000 subscribers to start with and two days before Christmas I knocked out the first newsletter and we were off and running for four or five years.

How about that?

Right. Number three on your list was no till is environmentally sound and a lot of people in Washington ought like it.

They should like it. They're always wanting to look at environment, especially today, when they're looking at carbon credits, trying to figure out how to measure carbon and some of that stuff. One thing no-till does is it builds organic matter. The deep rip chisel plow certainly doesn't. It breaks organic matter down and the no-till farming increases organic matter. It protects that carbon that they're all talking about. Someone's trying to figure out how to measure it accurately. It definitely is more efficient. The government ought to love every bit of it because that's the avenue they're going at this moment with all this carbon talk and climate change and things. They ought to subsidize it with a little bit of money, which I think they may if they can measure the carbon properly.

Right. What do you think? Can you get set up where you could get carbon payments on the ground you work?

Well, we're going to have to figure out who's going to pay it and how they're going to measure it because there's not a good way to measure it. I don't know if you saw the other day that Elon Musk, that owns Tesla and SpaceX, about the richest guy there is right at the moment in the world. He's offered a 100 ... And you may have seen this, Frank. He offered a $100 million for anybody to come up with an honest, good way to measure the carbon. Apparently there's not a good way or they would have it and he wouldn't be offering the money. 

And I think he's a pretty smart guy, obviously. And so he's wanting to offer a lot of money for somebody that can have a good accurate way to measure that where they can pay to buy it, for carbon credits, as they say. The book isn't written on that yet, but it's definitely stuff that the government appears to be liking. So yes, they definitely like no-till.

Right.

Yes, yes.

Well, it's like on one of the farms you got, if you were to get carbon payments for six or seven years, it's a little extra income, but then the land owner sells off to someone else and it's a guy who does minimum tillage or something and he comes in there and works that ground. We probably have lost all this carbon that they've been paying you for, for the past six or seven years.

That's a good point. I think so. Good point.

Right. Right. Fuel savings with strip-till versus conventional or minimum till.

Yeah, like with the corn, for example, you're going to strip-till and plant your corn. We even strip-tilled some beans through the years Just for fun of it. Well, we were actually putting some fertilizer under there is what we were doing. Stripping ahead of the beans. Normally you wouldn't do that, but we were trying to see if a few extra pounds of potash in a strip made a difference, rather than say, broadcasting it. That's another story. 

It definitely saves money because you don't have to own a chisel plow, you don't have to own a soil finisher, you don't have to own all this extra equipment that you're paying for, that you got to ensure, you got to maintain. You're burning a lot of fuel. When you're running a big four wheel drive tractor out there and it costs you $150 an hour to run it with fuel and just hour wear and tear on it and you're pulling a chisel plow that costs you 80,000 bucks or more. All of a sudden, there's a lot of advantages to not do that. 

We haven't owned a chisel plow for years, but the little bit we do ... I was mentioning to you the one farm where we have to do it, my brother chisels it for us because we don't have a chisel plow. A deep pillage tool on our farm and nor do I want one. So we have to pay my brother to do that field for us, just because that's how it is for the moment.

Right. So in your strip-till system, how many trips would you make over the field? Walk me through the trips you make.

Well, we just make the strip. The trip with the strip bar. We put on the spring strip, we'd put on 28% nitrogen in the dry fertilizer or liquid fertilizer, which the last few years we've been liquid fertilizer, PMK. Real low salt. So we go liquid. You put that on, that's all in one pass and then the planter comes along and plants, of course you also got spraying. On corn, we've been going to a herbicide program where we only spray once. We don't spray pre-plant. We spray after the corn's planted, up to where it's four or five inches tall before we spray it. 

So one application with the sprayer takes care of all of the weeds on the corn. So we've went away from even two sprayings on the corn. You got tillage, you got the planting and then you got one spraying on it. We've been doing Y-drops on nitrogen, for a little extra nitrogen. That is a trip that we choose to make. Wouldn't have to, but we do it on our farm and we do it on the majority of our acres, almost all of them. So they're what, three, four trips total, then you combine.

Then if you made fall strips, you'd have another trip.

Yeah. And then if you made the fall strip, you just wouldn't do any strips in the spring, then you'd just start planting in the spring. So you'd still have about four trips total. The strip and the planting and the spraying and our case, the Y-dropping of the nitrogen.

So are you into a traditional one-year corn, one-year soybean rotation or you got some continuous corn or what?

We have no continuous corn. We dropped the continuous corn in 2009. We were in continuous corn on some farms for quite a while. And something happened, Frank, when they changed the genetics of corn, the corn yields and continuous corn dropped off drastically, dramatically. And something changed. We fertilized the same. We tilled the same, we did this, we did that. Strips were the same. Everything was the same. When the corn yields after '09 started to fall away. And the only thing I can put my finger on, and this is only my opinion, somebody will say I'm crazy and that's okay. It's my opinion, is the fact that genetics in our corn changed that year with the smart stack stuff. It's not built, in my opinion for continuous corn, my opinion only.

So we never go continuous corn anymore. Now we do run a rotation, two-year beans, sometimes. Corn, two-year beans and then corn, but never more than two years of beans back to back because we've noticed, we can plant beans two years in a row. We see no yield drag at all. But beans have been ... The last five years or so have been more profitable per acre than corn, where I live.

Sure.

And so you go where the money is. And so we've been running that one-year corn, two-year bean thing. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. On corn and soybeans, are you buying stacked varieties or pick and choose? Oh, you do? Okay.

We buy stacked varieties for the corn and of course, we're buying the flex type soybeans this year that we can do either dicamba or Liberty on. We're going to have some enlist beans, my son ordered, he's in charge of all that. I work for him now, but we're going to have some enlist beans that he's got on some farms.

Yeah, well I'm  like you. I work for our son, he's running the company and I work for him.

There you go.

Also gives me the opportunity to do pretty much what I want to do.

Oh, same here.

If we get a compliment for something, I take it and if it's a problem I tell people they got to go talk to him.

I do the very same thing, Frank. You and I are on the same page here. I like the ability of not having to make decisions anymore.

Right. So you harvest a crop of soybeans in the fall and you're going to strip-till it in the corn. Where do you put the rows, in between the old soybean rows or on top of them or what?

Both. Done both ways. 

Which works best?

It doesn't seem to matter. It doesn't seem to matter. It's a little easier to lay it between the old rows, but putting it on top of the old row is not a problem either. Our strip bar ... When we designed those row units, we did not ever use a swivel coulter. It was a rigid coulter from the get-go. It could flex up and down, but it did not swivel and it's very easy. It's like having a whole bunch of rudders across there. It keeps the bar pretty straight. So it's easy to run on top of the old bean row, which is not ridged anyway because it's no-till. It works either way. I don't see a problem either way as far as your crop, a corn following. Whether it's between them or on them.

All right, so the next item was fertilizer savings because you go to root zone banding, you get it down there where it wants, so there's some savings with fertilizer with strip-till, right?

Yeah, about half on the PMK. 

Wow.

Yeah, it's a big cut. Big cut and nitrogen we don't ... We don't scrimp on the nitrogen part. You got to have that no matter how you call it. But the PMK we found out by putting it in a small area, you can get by with about half of what you were broadcasting because you're only covering the area where the corn is. You're not putting it in all those parts per million or billion, if you want to say of soil and spreading it out. You're putting it right where the plant can utilize it. And so we feel that the savings is well worth that and no yield drop.

Oh, that's great. So the next one would be a spring strip-till might make more sense. And in the fall, particularly when you're applying nitrogen and some other fertilizers.

Particularly if you're using liquid nitrogen, they don't like you to put that on in the fall in the strip. You have to put it on in the spring, like 28%. But that's the only difference. The spring, again, it works better, I believe in the flatter grounds. On the hillsides, depending on the winter you have or early spring, you could get some erosion down the strips because somewhere you got to go up and down the hill and you could get some erosion in those situations. So the spring strip seems to be the best way to go.

Stripped hills that shine in a dry year or a wet year?

Oh, I think the yields shine better in a dry year because you haven't disturbed all that soil between the rows and you still got residue there to hold the moisture in between the strips. So I think in a dry year it does show up better than it does in a wet year. Now one thing about a wet year, if you've got the strip laid, that's the first thing that's going to warm and dry in a no-till situation though. So that does complement the no-till planter because you've got that black strip 8 or 10 inches wide that you're going to plant on. Where you'd be forced to wait several days in a wet spring before you can no-till. 

Last year we had a wet spring and we had these five inch ... These 50-year rains at one time and the straight no-till, it had to wait. It had to wait several days before it would go in the neighborhood. For all of us. Yep.

Have you looked at no tilling beans before you strip-till corn in the spring?

Yeah, we plant beans first now. We planted probably a fourth or better. About a third of our beans this past year, we planted before we ever planted any corn. We try to plant them as early into April as we can and then plant the corn. If you could pick and choose the days, I would plant the beans anywhere from the 10th to the 15th of April and try to plant corn. The nice part would be if you could plant it in the last week of April, sometimes the weather doesn't allow that. Best case scenario would be that, for us.

What yield gain would you get on soybeans planted three weeks earlier after corn?

I think if you can plant the soybeans earlier than later, we do that with the later maturities. We try to plant them early and then the earlier maturity of beans, plant them after the corn because we're spreading our risk out. I can tell you five to seven bushels on early planted beans, especially if we're in that three, six, three, seven maturity range, we're better off to plant them early. I don't see a great deal of difference in a three one or a three two bean. I honestly can't see a big difference between April 15th and May 5th either. It's just the maturity of the bean. Well, from what I've observed. 

Are you in 30 inch rows?

Yes, sir. Corn and beans. Yes, sir.

And do you use the same planter without any changes for both soybeans and corn?

Correct. Yes.

Okay. Next one was differ the mound by seasons. So if you were building in the spring, how wide, how tall will your berm be versus in the fall?

In the fall it's okay to build the berm a little taller and change the disc sealers in the back to roll the berm a little higher. And that's the goal because you know it's going to winter and settle naturally. In the spring, you got to keep the berm a little bit shallower because it doesn't have any wintering. If you get the berm too high, and I've learned this, I've made this mistake. So I've learned this. You get the berm too high in the spring, you don't get them shallowed out in the back and shallow that berm height. When you go along with the row cleaner on the planter, you've rolled away the two inches that you really wanted and now you're back planting in wet dirt again, wet soil.

So you want a shallower one, in my opinion, in the spring. If it's flat, I'm tickled with that. But you want a shallower one, so that you don't have to roll hardly anything away. Your goal is to just maybe kick a few clods out of the way with the row cleaners and plant the corn. But if you get that thing mounted too much and it doesn't settle, you're going to have to move some soil because your depth is terrible for the row unit because your gauge wheels are trying to balance themselves on top of the mound off the row unit. So shallow in the spring and a little bit taller in the fall is my response.

Would you use a different knife between fall and the spring?

Yep. In the fall we'd use a mole knife. They still call them mole knives, use that, but in the spring you change and go to a more standard knife that's not as aggressive because the ground works easier in the spring anyway. So using just a standard standard ammonia knife to put it on, on that application. Yes. Yeah. Not as aggressive. No.

Well, the next one is rolling baskets, but I want to read a quote that you made back in 2009 and we'll talk about it.

Yep. Yeah.

You said, "I've worked with strip-till for 20 years and I've seen the devastation of what a basket can do in the fall if you don't know what you're doing."

That's correct.

So tell me about baskets in the fall versus the spring, et cetera.

Baskets in the fall, they have a hard time breaking up the clumps because the ground's a little bit harder coming off of the row unit and making the strip. You got to know what you're doing with the baskets in the fall because if you mash it down too hard in the fall with the baskets, and that again depends how much pressure you want to run on them. Some people have now got to where they're running a little looser and not putting a lot on them. If you squeeze that down in the fall, you're going to have a divot in the ground next spring to plant in. 

I'll give you an example of where I learned that, when I was a little kid. My dad one time, he had a tiling machine. We always did our own tiling on our farm growing up, my dad went out and he tiled some ground out there north of our house, one day when I'm in school. I was about seventh or eighth grade and dad, he tiled the field, him and my uncle, and he back-filled it with a nice wind row of dirt and everything and you didn't get all done. He said, "Hey, when you get home from school ..." I got home. He said, "Change your clothes and go out there with the dirt blade and finish rolling the dirt into the rest of the tile ditch before supper."

So I go out there and I did that. Man, I did a nice job and it looked just like what he'd done ahead of that. Well, I thought I'm going to help him. I'm going to drive the tractor down that mound of dirt, squeeze it down so it's nice and flat for next spring. So I drove on it. Now you're talking to 560 International, which doesn't weigh anything. So I'm not breaking tile, Frank. I'm just squeezing that nice hump down, making it look pretty. I was so proud of that. He come home and he saw that and he chewed on and he said, "What in the world are you doing?" I said, "I'm making that so we don't have to mess with it next spring." He said, "Let me tell you something." He said, "Next spring you're going to have a hole in the ground." I said, "No. We didn't add any or take any dirt away. We just pushed the dirt back down in there on top of the tile you put in today. We didn't change the dirt amount." He said, "I'll tell you what he said next spring we'll have a hole there." And dad was right. 

And so you take that same thing if you squeeze that mound down too hard with a strip-till bar, the next thing that happens all of a sudden over the winter and when spring rains come,. Now that soil, wherever it goes, it goes down and now you've got a depression in the ground and that's not where you want to plant.

Sure.

So baskets, if you don't treat them right in the fall ... They can cause a problem if you don't understand that method. And again, I learned that from the old tile story.

Mm-hmm. Well, the last point in this article we did, you were talking about equipment trains that don't work. Some of them would have a tractor, a liquid or dry fertilizer toolbar and hydro-stack. Some could be 90 feet long out behind the front of a four wheel tractor. So give me your thoughts about that.

Well, equipment trains are very hard to hold straight to plant on. You get a tractor and you got to pull between with either liquid or dry fertilizer on it. Then you got your strip-till bar behind it. Several manufacturers when they come into the business, that's what they did. We never built that type of system. Our toolbars that we built were built to carry the fertilizer right on board. So you had one implement behind a tractor, that was it. You didn't have a train that you were dragging through the field. 

Now, if you had a farmer that wanted to put on dry fertilizer and he had our bar with a dry unit, he would've to pull an anhydrous tank maybe in the fall because there was no other choice. But the main thing was to keep the strip-till bars as close to the tractor as you could, so it didn't wander up and down uneven terrain. You wanted to keep them as straight as you could because you had to follow the same path next spring with the corn planter.

So long trains were very detrimental. I've seen trains out in Iowa on some hillsides in North Central Iowa, where it was so bad that the gas rows, we call it, between each pass, actually touched on the side of the hill because the toolbar was so far from the tractor. It was cutting the corner, so to speak, as it went round a curve or even on straight side of a hill. So that was where I never believed in a long train. And that was the selling point of why ... When we built our Model 6200 bars, they all had onboard fertilizer. It carried right on the toolbar. So you didn't have that long train to contend with. So it was easier to keep the rows straight and keep the guess row as accurate as you could from past to pass.

Right. I've seen some of these long trains up in Western Canada and Alberta and Manitoba, Saskatchewan but it's a one-time deal up there with them not having this ... The combine can tackle anything of wheat or rye, but some of those are just huge and they go forever. And then some of the grain cart is practically a two-story building that they're pulling in behind it.

Yes, exactly. Yeah.

So looking ahead at strip-till, what innovations do you think we still need or what will people come up with that's new for strip-till?

I think the biggest innovation is that we have got to be able to steer the toolbar, to make that toolbar as accurate as we can. And I think we also need to complement that with the ability to steer the planter to stay on the strip because not everybody's fields in the country are like a pool table. The flatter they are, the easier the job is. We got both grounds, so we see both sides of the story. I think we need to have the ability to steer the toolbar. 

I have one patent that does that, that steers the toolbar and keeps it straight. And so you got GPS and a receiver, antenna, receiver on the toolbar and you got one on the tractor and then that would steer them both and keep a straight line. Then you can duplicate the same thing with the corn planter. When we get to that, when we're steering both implements, it'll be real easy to keep it right on the center every time within an inch of the center with RTK technology. Technology's there. It's just a matter of getting the hardware to do it.

Yeah.

Yep.

Well, we've talked about an hour. I see why we can call you the grandfather of strip-till because it's innovative, well deserved.

Well, I appreciate it. 

I grew up on a livestock farm like you did, and milking cows and lugging hay bales is what made me an editor. My dad used to say, "You just decided it was easier to tell farmers what to do rather than do the work yourself."

Hey, I'm with you. Amen. 

Right. And I've been on farms in all 50 states and I've never been on a farm that I didn't learn something. There were farms I didn't learn a lot or saw something that shouldn't be done, but it's been great.

Well, that's great.

Yeah. I will let you go. Thank you very much for doing this. I appreciate it.

You bet. Good to hear from you, Frank.

Okay. Take care.

Hey, that was a great conversation from Frank Lessiter and Rich Follmer. Thanks to both those guys for taking the time to record it. Also, thanks to our sponsor, Environmental Tillage Systems for making this podcast series possible. And thank you once again for tuning into the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast. And remember, for all things strip-till, head to Striptillfarmer.com. We'll see you next time. Have a great day.