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On this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, get the scoop on the latest strip-till tools, technology and trends that we uncovered during our recent travels. 

The Strip-Till Farmer editorial team traveled to several shows and field days this year, from the Commodity Classic to the Farm Progress Show and many farmer clinics in between.

On this episode, we take you inside the action as we get the scoop from manufacturers about brand-new strip-till rigs, attachments, fertilizer and cover crop applicators, game-changing technology upgrades and more. We also ask researchers and farmers about some of the latest strip-till trends they’re seeing in their neck of the woods.

The Strip-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment.

Since 1930, Yetter Farm Equipment has been providing farmers with profitable solutions. From residue management and fertilizer placement to seedbed preparation, our equipment is designed to maximize your inputs, save you time, and deliver a strong return on investment. Explore our full line of planter attachments, precision fertilizer placement options, strip-till units, and stalk rollers at yetterco.com. Let Yetter help you prepare your equipment lineup for success today.

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Full Transcript

Hey, great to have you with us for another episode of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast. I'm your host, technology editor, Noah Newman. Big thanks to our sponsor, Yetter Farm Equipment, for making this series possible.

So our team has been on the road a lot this year. We've been to several shows and field days. And on this episode, we're going to highlight some sights and sounds from our travels. And we'll start at the Farm Progress Show in Decatur, Illinois, where we saw a ton of stuff, and we got an up close look at some brand new strip-till equipment. Let's start with these residue managers from Yetter.

Hi, Andy Thompson with Yetter Farm Equipment. And we are here debuting a new product from Yetter, the residue managers now that we have added to our lineup for adding onto Case IH applicators. So anhydrous applicators, fertilizer applicators from Case IH, they're Nutri-Placer models. And then they've had them for a number of years. The units are oftentimes used to create some strips for strip-till to apply in hydros most commonly.

But one of the shortcomings that we hear often from custom applicators and then also farmers is that the residue management portion of that is just not up to the performance-wise of the rest of the machine. So what we have introduced is two new row cleaner options for those applicators. So one option here is going to come with a mount that's actually going to go on the coulter. So we're going to call this the coulter mounted option. This allows us to put a stem with the row cleaner out front.

Of course, what you see here is we also have this cylinder on there. This air cylinder will be adjusted from the cab. And so it gives you the operator the ability to adjust the performance of that row cleaner from the cab.

You also even have a raised lower function. So if you got into a field where you did not want to use them or some end rows or something of that nature, you can actually just with one button, you can lift them all the way up. So that's one option.

The other option we have is going to mount right on the shank. This is the high clearance shank from Case IH. This right here, it's going to have three bolts in it. And so this portion is the other row cleaner. It's going to bolt right to those three bolts. This is also going to have an air cylinder on it. And you can see that this one here is going to have a parallel linkage. So again, from the cab, it's going to allow us to be able to adjust the down pressure, which is in turn then going to adjust the performance of that row cleaner. We also have the raised lower function on that one. So if we don't want to use those, we can raise them up.

So what we're trying to do is address somebody that's wanting to use this style of an applicator. Maybe you already have the style of an applicator, just to get a better residue management performance on that applicator to be able to use that in strip-till. Whether that be just for this model only or in some cases where somebody is going to use a two pass strip-till system, this being the first pass, our fall pass, being able to do a little bit better job of managing that residue while we're applying that fertilizer.

So any other information that you're looking for on this, you can give us a call or look at our website at yetterco.com.

Summers Manufacturing meanwhile unveiled its brand new Apex strip-till unit. Let's check out some of the key features.

My name is Matt Volkmar. I am the director of sales and marketing for Summers Manufacturing. And behind me you can see our Apex strip-till unit. This is actually a kind of partnership that we're doing with Precision Planting to look at strip-till on 20-inch rows. So this machine here is set up on 20-inch 24 rows with a 17-ton, three-hopper bin. The Apex series comes with either a two-bin or three-bin options. You can get that in 14-ton, 17-ton, or up to 24-ton. It has an auto greaser. It's got hydraulic tarp on it. And then you can do most typically a 30-inch row spacing, but we've sold quite a few that have 22-inch spacing. And this 20-inch we're just testing out this fall with Precision Planting, as I mentioned.

This is a machine that if you are looking at maximum durability at a strip-till, kind of your go-to. The kind of target here is that if you are going to be doing 10,000 acres or more, a large grower, or you are a custom applicator, this is the go-to product that you would like to look at because you're not going to be wrenching on it and you're going to have that durability, because during the fall we have a very tight window to work with, and your uptime's going to be just incredible with this machine.

We have the little brother to this, which is our Verdant model. That's going to be either a 12-ton or 14-ton 50/50 dual bin system. That'll go up to 12-row or 30-foot toolbar, but we can also offer that in customized spacings as well. It will not have the auto greaser, it will not have the hydraulic tarp or the electric tarp on it. And you're looking at more of an entry-level tool when we're talking about the Verdant as compared to the Apex that we have here behind us.

There is, depending who you talk to, the yield boost that you get out of 20-inch corn is pretty popular. 22-inch, there's a lot of people in the Red River Valley, Summers Manufacturing is out of Devils Lake, North Dakota. 22-inch is very prevalent there. And so if you've got farmers that are looking at going to strip-till but don't want to be forced into 30-inch and switching everything else over, they can utilize 20 and 2-inch spacing on our rigs.

Everything on the row unit is hydraulic, and so everything is done from the cab, which is phenomenal. If you're in different conditions, you can easily adjust your settings from the cab. There's no or minimal coming out here and making those changes. And also with the auto greaser, every single point is getting greased and you don't have to worry about, "Oh, I went through the whole machine and I missed a few." And so there might be a bearing problem or there might be a spot that was supposed to get grease and didn't get greased. So it's just peace of mind. And we believe that it's one of the most robust, if not the most robust row unit on the market.

And there was a lot of buzz about drones at the show. Agri Spray Drones introduced the EAVision J150. And company founder, Taylor Moreland, gives us a scoop.

So we just launched it, released it today. We've been teasing it for the past few weeks here. Been testing it much longer than that. That one over there actually has 10,000, well, 11,000 acres on it. So we've been putting this to the pace. So the J150 is the biggest drone currently in the US, 20 gallons liquid tank, 180 pound dry tank, LiDAR with the best terrain following we've ever seen. And it turns out it's pretty durable as well. So really excited to bring it to market.

Well, what sets this one apart besides, of course, the size of it is the sensor system, the spray system, the battery system. So this is LiDAR right here. No other drone has this anywhere in the world, actually. This is automotive-grade LiDAR, made to detect small obstacles at 80 miles per hour in a self-driving car. It is on a spray drone. So this incorporates into the obstacle avoidance and the terrain following, which is why we've seen this drone do things that no other drone has done at high speeds and high payloads as far as terrain tracing goes.

On the spray system side, you can dump a tank in, well, less than two minutes. It's a 10.5 gallon per minute flow. So you're doing high-volume work, flying fast, and high-volume work that you can keep those speeds up.

And the nozzles and the atomizers with the four nozzles on there, when we did our swath testing, we've done that for past four years on every model. We've never seen any drone have as wide of a pattern and low of a variation as this one does with those four nozzles all churned on. We're getting swath widths of 40 ... well, from 45 down to 32 feet, depending on how you operate, with very good CV values.

And then the battery system, you can empty out a full tank on a two-gallon rate, which is exactly what you need right here in the Midwest doing fungicide work. And the battery charging, we've been able to keep up with three batteries in pretty much every scenario.

Every drone brought to market, every sprayer brought to market, whenever it's announced, nobody's tested it, right? It's just brought to market, come from China or wherever it's come from, and they don't use drones like we do. They've tested it there. They don't use them like we do here in the US. We've learned that over our many years in this industry. So what we wanted to do is before we actually launched it, let's get over 10,000 acres on at least one unit, and then let's run at least a couple dozen with other operators doing real-world application.

So actually since June, there have been several dozen flying out in the field with different operators. This is our personal one right there. And we said if we're not spraying for a customer doing fungicide or cover crop or whatever, then we're just going to be spraying water, and we're just trying to rack up hours on it. What's going to break first? I just want to know, what is going to break first before we launch it? So we replaced two parts. That's it.

Another cool thing we came across at the show was this new app from a company called Terraform Tillage that helps growers map soil compaction with ease.

I'm Josh Jeske. We're here at the Farm Progress Show with No-Till Farmer, and I'd like to show you a new tool for mapping soil compaction. So when farmers think of compaction, maybe they think about doing tillage, right? Going out and disk gripping or inline ripping certain areas that might have some root restrictive issues.

One thing we're looking at here is actually implementing cover crops as a tool for reducing compaction. If you look, there's a little bit of areas that don't look exactly as good as the others. And when you go out and look, use these tools to measure it, and that's exactly what we're finding. And what we're looking for is over the next few years for this soil to start to regenerate and become very nice and mellow for your cash crop.

So with that, these are soil penetrometers, penetration meters, if you will. This measures in pounds per square inch how much force it takes to poke down into your soil, and that mimics what a root is feeling. So a lot of things can influence that. Your soil texture can influence that. Soil moisture can influence that as well, but what we're looking for is your soil to be as mellow as possible. That's what's going to help you and your cash crop the very best. So this just measures in PSI. So anything under 200 PSI is fantastic. That's exactly what you're looking for.

Some of the best fields I've ever done in the four years of doing this as a service for different farmers around the country, I found that no-till with specific cover crops can have a beautiful effect on mellowing out that soil.

We just released these one year ago today, and I'm super excited to say that we're now in 32 countries. And it's not just your regular corn and soy that we're seeing. To my surprise as a corn and soybean farmer, I thought that was going to be the big hit. Still is, but we're seeing all sorts of different species in food and produce, agroforestry, lawn and turf even is another great application for using compaction testers.

All we've really done here is made smartphone mounts for all the different brands and gave a free app so that you can download and collect these measurements and map them out in real time. So you know exactly where to focus on issues in your field with compaction and where you can maybe cut back on costs that you would normally spend trying to fix something that may not be there.

So this is the dial of the penetrometer. Now this is an analog version, so it's just using a fluid pressure dial to tell you how much force it's taking to poke in. So as I said, this is a parking lot, so we will find that we really quickly exceed the pressure level that you would want for your crop.

So all this app does, it gives you the ability to type in your measurements as you go, and then it uses your phone's GPS to show you exactly where to focus in your fields and where you can maybe cut back on tillage or implement things like cover crops to remediate issues where you're going to lose yield to compaction.

There's analog ones. These go up to 300 PSI. And then there are digital ones as well, and those can go up to 900 PSI. So those work a little better in dryer conditions, but all around a super great tool. This tool has actually been around for well over 100 years, but now we brought into the new era with smartphone technology. Now anyone can download and map soil compaction with ease.

All right. A couple more things to highlight at the Farm Progress Show before we head elsewhere, KUHN Krause introduced its new Liqui-PRO strip-till fertilizer application system. Let's check it out.

Hi, my name's Michael Berggren, product manager for KUHN Krause, and we're here at the Farm Progress Show, and I'm here to introduce our new Liqui-PRO system for the Gladiator. This is a turnkey ISOBUS rate controller for our liquid fertilizer application for strip-till.

And so with this machine, one of the things that you can see is this is a turnkey, fully integrated system. It comes from the factory fully set up to apply fertilizer. So it's a rate controller. We have row-by-row sensing, blockage, and relative rate control, and then we also have two and four-section control.

One of the other things that comes standard with this machine is a 1,600-gallon tank, and so that we're able to apply fertilizer from ranges of 10 to 100 gallons per acre and speeds of four to seven miles per hour.

So one of the key benefits of this is that traditionally liquid fertilizer application has been you can buy a tank, you can get a pump, and you can figure out the system on your own. And so with this system, we are able to provide a turnkey solution for a customer who is able to have something that's ready to go from the dealership. And so we have factory-installed components, we have own rate controller, and the visual indication of row-by-row sensing technology, Tattler, is integrated into the rate controller. So it's one screen for rate, number of gallons you have left, and then also monitoring your rate controller, including the row-by-row flow sensing technology, Tattler.

So this system comes ready to use, easy to use. We have our quarter turn, no-wrench adjust orifices, and it comes with all four sizes to be able to hit that range of product that we want to apply. We also have a standard three-inch fill, so quick connect on your camlock system. And then we also have an additional ... if your pump on your nurse trailer goes out, we have the ability to suck product on to the strip-till machine.

This is available now, is available on our pool-type machine and coming soon to our three-point mounted machine.

Let's burn a quick timeout for a word from our sponsor, Yetter Farm Equipment. Looking for innovative solutions to maximize your farm's productivity, look no further than Yetter Farm Equipment. They're dedicated to providing farmers with the highest quality equipment, from road cleaners and closing wheels, to fertilizer equipment, strip-till units, and stock devastators. Yetter has the tools you need to optimize your farming operation. Visit yetterco.com. That's Y-E-T-T-E-R-C-O-dot-com to learn more and find a dealer near you.

And the last thing from the Farm Progress Show I wanted to share with you guys is this new RTK ASSIST from Ag Leader, which keeps that make-or-break accuracy rolling through signal interruptions. Logan Handsaker explains how it works.

My name is Logan Handsaker at Ag Leader, and we're here at Farm Progress Show 2025. I just wanted to highlight some of the new things coming from Ag Leader, specifically around RTK ASSIST, which is a really cool and valuable feature for those that are running RTK correction sources, whether it be radio or cellular-based RTK correction sources such as NTRIP. And what we've known and for a long time is growers need to have that reliability all the time. And sometimes those signals or those corrections can get interrupted, whether it's by tree lines or their cell correction area is unreliable, for whatever reason, their auto steer can't go down because they're losing communications. And that's where RTK ASSIST is really designed to shine.

RTK ASSIST is essentially a backup GPS base or GPS correction source that's running in the background of your RTK auto-steer solution as you're running through the field. And if you experience those interruption times from your RTK, will actually provide you a secondary correction source to continue operation up to 20 minutes. So it'll allow you to maintain that accuracy in those difficult periods of time when you need it most and let you run on that line until you regain those corrections from whether it be radio-based or cellular-based.

So we're excited about what this means, we're excited about how growers are going to leverage that. It's a free service that we offer with the GPS 7500 receiver. So if you have that receiver unlocked for RTK and you're using a radio or cell-base system, this satellite-based TerraStar backup, RTK ASSIST comes with that for free. So there's no additional subscriptions needed. It's just there. It's there when you need it, and you have it automatically with the latest version of firmware for that receiver and that RTK unlock.

So we're very excited to bring this to the market and see how our growers can leverage that to maintain their uptime and auto-steer accuracy throughout the harsh conditions that they experience.

We just released firmware today that makes this available. For growers that already have their RTK unlocked receiver, there will be an additional charge to get this functionality, but moving forward with the receivers and the new firmware, if they get that unlock for RTK, that RTK ASSIST service comes with it at no additional charge.

Beep, beep, beep, let's head back in the car on the road over to Crawfordsville, Iowa, where we go for the Strip-Till Field Day hosted by Iowa State Extension. There were 12 toolbars on display, including one that many people saw for the first time from Black Eagle Ag.

Hi, I'm Marty Gilbertson with Black Eagle Ag Solutions based out of East Moline, Illinois. We're here at the Iowa State Field Day. Unfortunately, it got rained out, but we're all still having a good time here today, and we're showing off our Black Eagle strip-till machine. We have 6, 8, 12, and 16-row units available. We are a knife machine. We're working on coulters, so we can do spring strip freshening coming up here. Hopefully in the spring should have that option available.

We believe that we have one of the most robust built row units on the market. They were developed in the tablelands of Australia, and then all those ideas and fails and wins were brought here to the United States to refine and develop. And they're completely built here in the United States, 100%. Again, built in East Moline, Illinois.

And we have so many different machines here. What would you say is something unique about this?

What's very unique about our machines, we have the row cleaners. They're by far and away the largest row cleaner you'll see in the market. The idea behind them is that they actually turn slower so we're not whipping all that trash into the next row when you get up to higher speeds. They're also, if you don't want to throw your trash out, you can reverse them and throw them in to the next row. So we have that option. We have a large center cutting wheel. We believe the road cleaners are probably one of the most unique features we have. We have hydraulic trip for rocks and same things a lot of other people do, but the row cleaners we think are a huge win for our company.

And on the market now?

Yes, absolutely available. We have plenty of six-row, eight-row bars available. We have 16-row unit available with narrow transport, 11-feet, 8-inches wide. So we do have those at the factory. We're working on the 12 row, and hopefully have that out soon.

Nice turnout at the field day despite horrible weather. As Iowa State's Levi Powell tells us, that just shows how popular strip-till's becoming in this region.

Yeah, yeah. We've got a lot of really knowledgeable companies and folks here today that are hitting on the specifics of different equipment. A lot of the stuff I want to talk through today is for the folks that are looking to transition from either no-till or conventional till to strip-till, and what some of the challenges may be they may need to overcome, and what they need to be looking for in the equipment to help with that transition, and what might work better in their operation.

The other one is just the mindset of strip-till and what you need to be paying attention to to do a good job. A lot of times I tell people strip-till is very similar to planting. You need to have that similar mindset of job quality is really the key to success. And so what are the things we should be paying attention to? What should we be checking, making sure our product's getting where it needs to be, making sure our zones look like they need to, making sure we're doing a good job behind the machine? And that mindset is really more similar to a planter operator than it is a typical tillage operation that you might think of. And so helping people realize some quick little tricks and tips they can do in the field to evaluate their zones and their product placement, and make sure everything is where they want it to be and that their machine is performing to the best that it can. And if it's not, how do you look at it to make the adjustments that you need to to get the job quality that you want?

And you talk with a lot of growers in Iowa. What have you noticed in terms of strip-till trends? Do you see more people giving it a try? You think it's becoming more popular?

Yes. We see it growing in a lot of different, I'll say, hot pockets is the way we see it, is you'll get a couple guys that start into it, neighbors see it's being successful for them. They might do some custom work for some neighbors, and it just grows from there when you get a grower or a few growers started in an area, and we're getting more and more questions about it every year, it feels like.

We've been doing strip-till and aims within our research operation since 2016. And so we've been at it almost 10 years on a lot of our plots and programs up there. And so it's neat to see that more broadly adopted. And I think as your input costs are changing, different environmental regulations are changing, you get more and more people starting to take a look at it. And I think the biggest game changer has been the technology. We just have so much more technology today to make this easier, out-of-the-box as far as infield guidance and guidance lines and field management that we didn't have 10 to 12 years ago. And so it just keeps getting better and better and more easier to adopt for folks.

Back in March, we had boots on the ground at the Commodity Classic in Denver. And we stopped by the Environmental Tillage Systems booth for a first look at this new cover crop applicator.

Good morning. I'm Sean Arthur, regional sales manager with Environmental Tillage Systems. We're excited to show off our new cover crop applicator that we've added to our SoilWarriors. As you can see behind me here, this is going to be a tank. It's a partnership that we've had with Montag Manufacturing. They create the tank and metering system, but we've created the bracketry to allow this to be mounted on the front of our SoilWarriors. So this is something that can be purchased with a new machine or retrofitted on all our SoilWarriors that are out in the field already.

With all of the movement that we've got to increase cover crop anchors across the US, we've had a lot of customers that are asking about doing the cover crops while they're making their strip-tillage pass in the fall. So this is a chance to be able to apply your cover crops while you're still applying your fertilizer and creating those strips with your SoilWarrior.

So what this is right here is it's a machine or an attachment that's bolted to the front of your SoilWarrior. It gives you the capacity to hold up to 40 bushel of cover crops and then still control the rate. Inside the cap integrates into the entire machine so we can control that rate as we're going across the field to accurately apply the product as we're moving through the field.

The metering system that we have here allows us to use a whole range of cover crops, anything from cereal rye to product mixes that are going to have multiple products in there.

A metering system would also have the ability to do fertilizer if you wanted to do that instead. So this could be a dual-use system that would allow somebody to maybe apply cover crops in the fall. And then in the spring, if they wanted to put down a low rate of micronutrient, this would be a good place to be able to meter that out accurately in a separate pass.

It is currently available. We're excited to release it here at the Commodity Classic show, but we've done testing with it to make sure that it's going to be a very viable solution that we can support and stand behind, and going forward from here.

So the cover crop kit, the applicator and tank system is mounted on the front of the SoilWarrior, and then it's delivered through air to the rear of the machine. We have blockage sensors back here to make sure that we do have consistent flow out of each of the tubes, and then we do have multiple locations where we can apply this product or apply the cover crops.

Here we're showing it to be applied between the rows, but we do have the ability to apply the cover crop directly into the strip to make sure that we could get those cover crops to establish and hold the soil after those strips have been created. So we got the flexibility to set this up for whatever a customer wants us to be doing.

Next stop, the Ag Technology Solutions Group clinic in Nokomis, Illinois. Josh Stoller strip-tills corn and no-till soybeans just north of Bloomington, Illinois. He's also a regional manager for Precision Planting. Stoller talked about some of the technologies he's using in his operation, lessons learned from the previous growing season, and sprayer maintenance tips for strip-tillers to consider this off-season.

For us on our own farm, no-till and strip-till, I mean, one of the big things is our closing system. Just a couple years ago, we put on what we call FurrowForce. We noticed we had some tougher to close situations on the planter in harder ground, wetter ground. Especially 2024 was wet for us through the entire season. And so we put FurrowForce on, which ended up as a two-stage closing system that we close with the first stage and then the second stage is managing soil density. So we lighten that up, try to just tiptoe over the top of the wet ground, and make sure everything we did get fully closed up. So that's been a big thing for us.

This year, we're going to start looking more into the technology on the sprayer. We're going to make some changes on the ... what we call SymphonyNozzle, is our PWM control on the sprayer. Make sure we do knock out all the weeds, that we don't have escapes and things like that. Looking at some of the camera technology. SymphonyVision | Rate, we're going to be adding this year as well, some of the crop scouting things, crop health, stand counts, stuff like that, or emergence consistency and just rate control using a full range of a label. If we don't have many weeds, we're going to cut back on the rate. If we do have taller or more small weeds, we will increase the rate and use the full range of the label and just try to get more efficient as we go through.

It is important to think when you look at weed escapes, how many make it through, is probably not going to be a major yield hit for a couple making it through. The big thing for us is, yeah, being multi-year with the seed bank that we're building up, especially with water hemp. We've had a lot of water hemp making it through lately, and the seeds that are there and viable for years to come is always a big thing. So weed escapes more for a seed bank. Long-term thing is a battle where we've just got to get 100% kill. We have not been, and we need to start. So we're looking at things to get more efficient and a better kill.

No, nozzle tips, I mean, especially if we've been using the same tips for years, the tips themselves on the bottom as they're coming out, if you look at the bottom, those do wear over time. And if I do a rate check or a bucket check or like a small cup check, if those are more than 10% off from what their target is, we've got to replace the nozzles. There are times when I'll be 30% off and you get, say, ends breakaways that hit the ground a couple times, it doesn't take much to get those 30, 50% off of a target pattern or application rate.

And so a lot of guys looking at them now and doing a bucket check nozzle by nozzle, see how much variation we've got. Do I need to replace those? Are they still good, still in line? All those go into weed escapes. If I don't get the right droplet size or pattern and rate, we're not going to get them killed like what we need them.

We're always expecting a good year. I mean, there's a lot of variables that go into it, but I think that we are set for success. Nobody knows what the weather's going to be like, what things are going to be like. We always try to plan for the best, but expect the worst and have things lined up. So are we looking forward to it? For sure, we are. Obviously, hope prices start coming back up, but we're going to be as efficient as we possibly can.

That'll wrap things up for this road trip edition of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast. Hope you enjoyed it. Thanks so much for tuning in. And thanks to Yetter Farm Equipment as well for making this series possible. Until next time, for all things strip-till, head to striptillfarmer.com. I'm Noah Newman. Have a great day.