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On this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, we’re headed to Louisville, Ky., for a recap of the National Farm Machinery Show. 

Managing editor Noah Newman catches up with manufacturers, farmers and agronomists to discuss the latest innovations in strip-till equipment, precision technology and nutrient management! 

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

Hello and welcome to 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. Head to yetterco.com. That's yetterco.com to see what they have to offer. Exciting stuff today. We're headed inside the National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville, Kentucky for a look at some of the latest equipment and nutrient management innovations we came across. Tons of strip-till equipment on display, including the new Landoll Vertistrip strip-till machine. Although it's not completely new, farmers have been using this unit for the past several growing seasons. So Landoll acquired the license to it from Hawkins and AGROdeviate. Let's check it out.

Good morning guys from National Farm Machinery Show. We are here with the new Landoll strip-till machine, the Vertistrip. So this is a new product from Landoll. This is to get to those acres, the guys are looking for more conservation tillage. We're looking how do we get to fertility and tillage and also helping what we're trying to do with the environment and their economics on the farm. So the Vertistrip is new today and yesterday at the Farm Machinery Show is the first time we're showing it publicly. It's been tested, proven in the field over the last few years in anticipation of the launch. So one of the things that makes this machine really unique is the functionality and how friendly it is for users. So when we look at it, we're trying to control everything we can from the cab. There's a lot of things that customers have gotten used to on planters and other equipment that we can do from the cab.

Now we're trying to get that into our strip-tillage machinery as well. So that comes in here. You can see a lot of air lines running across this unit, so all nice and tidy on here, but we are running our row cleaners from the cab just like your planter. So something that we've seen everywhere else in the industry, why shouldn't we be able to do it on our strip-till machines as well? We come back with down pressure that we control from the cab, no more springs that like to break and wear out over multiple seasons. And then we also control our finishing down here with the pneumatic basket. So depending on the kind of conditions, the time of year and things you're trying to do there, it really does a good job for finishing that soil surface or putting no pressure on it if you're running in the fall and you want to let it wear over the winter time.

So that's where we're at with the user functionality from the cab. Then we get onto the row unit itself. There's some real benefit here to no wrenches. We aren't using any set bolts to adjust your shank. We aren't taking off and adding weights to your row cleaners, anything like that. Everything on here is adjustable without tools. So the shank, you can adjust in half inch increments with a simple process to pull out the shank here. Adjust that down, adjust it up, and we can lock that in to position really simply on here. We also have the same kind of adjustment where we can go anywhere from a flat to a seven to a 13 degree angle.

And then from our depth, we can also set that in one, two, and three inch increments with our berm builders. Now this unit is also available in a full colter unit and it was designed from the beginning to be colter and shank, not an adaptation later on. So very adaptable for whether it's a spring use machine or a fall use machine and multiple fertilizer types. And we get to our air controller, is a very simple controller in the cab. Adjust up and down. It's not ISO or anything like that. It's not a bunch of things that can go wrong. It's very simple and robust. And that's what we're looking for for our customers. Landoll reliability and strength, they've seen from all our other equipment. We want to see that with strip-till and how do we curate longevity in the machine that they're buying from us.

So this isn't an investment in something that only used for two to three years. We're talking decades with these types of machines from Landoll. So that's what's in the Vertistrip. We come up to the toolbar as well. Just another aspect of the machine that is very Landoll-esque, heavy built, dual seven square toolbars, heavy duty hinges. These things are built out at half wall center, half a wall of seven square center sections on these as well, so they are very robust and meant to last a long time.

All right. From the north wing to the west wing we go. Brad Forkner, owner of Nutrient Management Specialists and former National Strip-Tillage Conference Speaker, had dozens of micronutrient and biological products on display. He fills us in on some outside the box inputs that strip-tillers are having big success with.

Brad Forkner, Nutrient Management Specialists, here at the National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville, going to talk about some of the things that are now available on the market. You hear a lot of talk about sugars. What we believe is that sugar is a wonderful thing if used in moderation, because what we think is if we overdo the sugar, we're going to explode the population of our bacterias. We're already bacteria dominant. We don't want to lose any more oxygen than we have to. So what velocity basically is, is a five-way sugar that's got some fulvic and some other things in it so that we get a little bit of sugar on the leaf, a little bit of sugar in the plant.

Next one is that we are now chelating our own zinc. So anytime that we can take something that is pharmaceutical grade out of the livestock world, we know that it's very safe. We know that it's contaminant free. So when you're not using an EDTA, which to me is more of a tank compatibility agent than it is a chelating agent, we're going to get a higher percentage of this inside the plant. So this is a 7%, you're used to a 9% EDTA. I still believe we're going to get more of this in. That's why you carry a leaf scanner so you can come back and validate the things you've done.

The little cedar heater here is 13 essential oils, and so they are part of nutritional movement. Essential oils will go back and forth through cell walls. They'll take something with them. This has always been on a apple juice carrier, so we always had some stratification issues. What you'll see here and what you can smell here is when you take a shear machine, which would be the same thing that we would use to homogenize milk, one quarter, 1% xanthan gum, and this no longer separates on us.

So we're using that also for anytime you're seeing some of these products that have sediments out of the bottom of your jug, your tote, it always says "Shake well before using." When you start running these kind of materials, adjust the pH a little bit, we're starting to get away from that. This little package here, and I'll show you the inside of it as well, we are taking the plant proteins that you're used to seeing some of your biology come in on, and we have now paired that with the material in this glass jar, which is pecan shells that are pulverized. So they are a 66,500 antioxidant, full of polyphenols, full of flavonoids. They are animal safe. They are human safe. They have that same electrostatic principle that was used in the dust. So they are food source. They're a wonderful carrier for the biology. We're now taking those and stacking biologies in there.

We're putting the plant growth regulators in there. We're putting the complement of micronutrients in there. So if we can get some cobalt at the base of the soybean plant, we've got a good chance to have nodules at two sets of leaves, sometimes one set of trifoliates. So as we get to visit with more and more of the people who are in the biological world, and we tell them what we're going to do, we hope to be the first people to offer you the option of building your biology by prescription, just like we are the nutrition. Deliver that through the planter box so you'll have the options now of putting the biologies on the seed, in the planter box, in the furrow or as early foliars. That pairs well with the new flat process this year of doing residue management in season when we typically have more moisture and we have more heat than we do at the end of the year.

Think about Western Kansas, Western Nebraska, they need to have the material standing in the field to hold the soil and they need to stop the snow that they can, but come springtime, once we have new roots, they are every bit as interested in recycling the nutrition, exposing any disease that's out there before it has a chance to come back and causes problems. So up and around the Oshkosh area this year, we were fortunate enough to have a guy that's still using a 38-inch row planter on group two beans. Now he had raised 230 bushel corn last year. We were able to break that down before harvest and still canopy group two beans in 38 inch rows by getting the biology into food sources in there.

This one over here for the guys that prefer talc, this is the pecan fiber with the talc. We can do the same thing. The little package here is your dried bacilluses that are spore formers. What makes a spore former different is when it gets cold, he doesn't die. He takes a rest. It warms up. He goes to work again. As we go on across here, one of the newer things we're using this year would be the squid juice. So think about the calamari in your restaurant. 48% of the squid goes there. 52% of the squid is left. So again, because it was a live animal, L- and D-amino acids, it's got your omega oils in there.

There was enough blood left in there. Blood is protein. Protein is nitrogen. So we've got a nitrogen component. We've got active amino acids in there. And if you're familiar with the chitins or chitinase people are talking about. We had the crabs and shrimps, so we were at 2%. It was chitinase. When we came out and Organisan brings out the Impact SIX last year, they included chitins that are coming out of the mushrooms, that gets us up to a 6%.

The chitins that would be in the squid juice starts out and gets us up to that 25%. So now we've got a fungi food, we've got amino acids, and we can have a natural insecticide, nematicide, fungicide. So because it is a faster release, now you can pair it with the ones that were on the market, think urea ESN. We have quick release. We have slow release. And if you are starting to talk about the algaes, guess where these boys eat, down in the Spirulina and Chlorella off the bottom of the ocean. We touched on the pecan fiber, this little thing we're calling alimento. How many people have had the option of getting some CRP ground turned loose way too late to make hay out of, or you have some other hay that got rained on and you already know that the protein and the feed value has been compromised immensely.

Consider that nothing but a lignin carrier, we have put together a full package of nutrition, spray it on the windrow, wrap it up in solid plastic, let it ferment. Now we have a zero waste, restore the nutrition that the cows have just really, really been happy to see. They'll try and knock down a bale ring, or we actually had to chase them out of the way when we wanted to go out there and unroll one. For the first time, we are making a liquid nickel. If you're using any kind of urea, especially like a UAN sidedress, this takes care of the ureas, makes that stuff work like it should have. Honey bee. So now we've got the boron. We've got the sweetener already in there. We believe boron is a transporter, so we use a little bit every time that we're going to do a foliar. We do not see boron staying inside the plant. So what we're doing is using small amounts every time that we are out there.

One of the things you ought to be familiar with would be aloe. Most of us would think about aloe as be something that would make our skin heal, but aloe is actually a long chain, 36, 38 chain sugar with enzyme activity. So that has become the fifth sugar in our five-way sugar mix we talked about. Over here, we have for the first time put together the molybdenum and nickel and the cobalt. So now we have the nickel that was in there for the ureas. We have the cobalt and moly that make all of your nitrogens reassemble in a quicker fashion. If you're familiar with the people that sell the sodium molybdate, 35%, we're just calling 16 because 19 of that is sodium. 16 is what you're actually getting out there for the molybdenum.

So if you haven't been taking molybdenum test and cobalt tests, you're probably going to be short on the most efficient way to put your nitrogen together. So a lot of these things came into being, if we're going to have to allocate all the dollars, get everything back we can, we want to spend only the money that you need. We are now trying to put in the biology. If you're working with a rise biome of biome makers and you know the biology that's in your fields, we can go back through and say, "You have these guys, do you want more or not?" We are not going to be able to put biology in there one piece at a time, buy prescription, buy what you need, come back with our tissue samplers, see the material out there, choose any company you want, make an amendment, then we come back and evaluate how much money did we spend?

What was the value? Who should all of us be choosing to work with in this industry so that we can get rid of some of the thought processes that are less than diligent for people bringing you some of the biology, biostimulants, plant growth regulators and those things. Let's cut down to what really works, put a number on it and decide is this year that we're going to raise all the bushels we can? Are we going to raise the economic bushels? If you know how much money per bushel should stay at your house and not all of us do, now we have a better guide point that says we can raise this amount of bushels and keep 50 cents at my house, or we can chase these until we're down to 10 cents and contribute to the [inaudible 00:15:29]. What is the most profitable thing to do at your house this year?

Spend about 70% of your money upfront, have some of it left to come back and make the amendments, utilize the strip-till, get those things down there where we can handle them. Use the cover crops that are going to contribute to breaking the soil loose, bringing some of the buried micronutrients back toward the surface. If you're still doing no-till, I'm all for it. Just keep enough oxygen in your ground that we keep building the organic matter and we keep feeding the biology that's out there doing its darnedest to make us a living.

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 row 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.com to learn more and find a dealer near you.

Very interesting stuff there from Brad. Now, another new thing we saw was SeedIQ from Beck's. This is an AI powered platform, free to use also for non-Beck's customers. Janelle Mauck shows us how it works during a live demo.

SeedIQ is launching today, so it's Beck's first, it's the industry's first tool that will help you place products based on answering a couple of questions based on the acres that you're farming. So we go ahead and start with corn, and it's going to ask you, are you more focused on grain or more focused on silage? So we're going to focus on grain this morning. It's going to ask you when you apply your nitrogen. So spring, fall, pre-plant, fall by sidedress or all in in-crop application. We're going to start with spring pre-plant. Did you make an in season fungicide application? We're going to go with yes. And then it's going to ask you when you made that application. Relative maturity range, so it goes all the way from 80 to 120. So we'll go ahead and keep it pretty simple and go from 95 day corn to 115 day corn.

Slide the bars there. Trait package. This automatically selected organic. Go with that. Your expected yield range and bushels per acre. And then it's going to go ahead and enter your ZIP code. It's going to ask if our acres are irrigated. We're going to go ahead and say yes. So then it's going to go ahead and do some thinking. So what it's doing right now, is it's gathering information that we've collected in Root Reveal, Kernel Reveal, Silk Reveal, as well as all of our PFR data. And it's using AI to figure out what products would fit best on our farm. So right here, it's going to give us a couple different options. So it's going to give us three product recommendations. It's going to give you at a glance what would fit best. It's going to tell you why it fits. It's going to give you some management tips for success.

And then it's also going to give you some watch out. So some things that you need to be aware of when you're out in the field or when you're managing this product. It also has some dig in here to where you can look into some additional insights and it actually has some studies that are linking to other places on the website so you can dig into it a little bit more. If you're not familiar with Root Reveal or Silk Reveal, we also have some Learn More areas because those are some pretty new research that we've been doing over the past two years. Root Reveal, we've got the root boxes here. So if you're familiar with those, that's the data that it's pulling from. You also can scroll back up and click on these three little dots, and it's going to go ahead and click download all insights, and it's going to give you a full 8.5 by 11, six-page breakdown as to why you should be selecting these products for your acres and some tips on how to manage them.

So you can go online to beckshybrids.com. Up here in the right-hand corner, there will be a button that says SeedIQ, and you can click on that, and you can go through and do your custom farm plan with our SeedIQ tool.

Back to the strip-till equipment now, Zimmerman Manufacturing showcased updates to its row units. Dan Guenther fills us in.

Hi, I'm Dan from Zimmerman Manufacturing, and we're kind of introducing a new front end to our Contour King strip-till here at the National Farm Show. We changed a few things up here. We had a depth ring on the inside of the culture that really wasn't holding the culture up as well as we liked. And when we went back to freshen that strip, it wanted to sink in a little bit more. So we were having to do a lot of gauge wheels and stuff. So we kind of changed it up again. So what we did was we put these two wheels up on each side of the front here. They ride on what would be virgin ground on the outside of the strip and that keeps it on a constant dirt, solid dirt, I should say, and not on the strip. When we come back and fresh and then we're not on that soft strip, we're on the outside of that strip.

So what that did allow us to do, one of the things that I had a problem with is when dirt stuck to the old culture, it would stick to the culture, it would fall off, the scraper would take it off, and it would fall in front of the road cleaner, then the road cleaner would throw it out. Now if it sticks to the dirt, the road cleaner is moved up, so it just falls into the area where the strip's going to be anyway, so we don't have to run a scraper on there, which is always good. Anytime I can get rid of a scraper, I love it. And then that just goes in there. We still cut our trash beforehand. We still got the air on it and stuff. These strips on that picture over there, if you ever strip-tilled and you went back on that strip right after you strip-tilled and just went and stripped it again, that sinks in and it just looks terrible.

We did that up there. It was in Kansas and the guy really didn't do it intentionally. He just went back out in the field and he stripped it and I walked over there wondering what it was going to look like because I was a little ways away and I got up there and I was just ecstatic. It was probably one of the best strips I ever saw and it was done that second time. So I am sold on these front wheels. I think they are the answer to a lot of the things that we were looking for. We will run them as an option either way for right now. We're not necessarily going with these going forward, but I can tell you everybody that's ordering them today probably is pretty much putting them on. So those are the new things that we're looking at. The other, I guess, the new thing that we really kind of did was one of the things that's always a pain in the butt in the dry fertilizer world is taking that hose off every time you wanted to do something with the shank.

So we've got this mechanism now where we can just take this off, you got your hose on here, you can just set this to the side, do whatever you want with the shank, and then when you're done, put it back on. Or if you want, you take it off, you can take that shank out, put these cultures in, and you just hang it on the culture unit, and you don't have to mess with all of them hoses and trying to get it off and on and just move them back and forth. That's on every machine that we do now. I guess we kind of been doing that for a little bit here now. So those are the new things from ZML. So if you're interested, get ahold of us and we'll explain it a little bit further.

Tell you what, the PTx precision planning booth was packed throughout the show. Lots of new technology on display over there. Let's check out the ArrowTube seed orienting delivery system and the Radicle Agronomics soil testing suite.

Hi, I'm Caleb Stuber with the marketing team at PTx, and we're here with the new ArrowTube technology that has just been released through precision planting. And so the ultimate goal of ArrowTube would be to orient seeds, trying to stick them tip down in the furrow for better, more consistent emergence. And so it's an amazing piece of technology that mates up with the V-set meter using basically a seed accelerator to help orientate the seeds using some frictional forces up here at the top, sliding it down this twisted seed tube here to try to use some centrifugal forces as well while a knife is kind of slicing almost like a sub-furrow in the ground, giving just a very little trench inside the furrow for that seed to land tip down inside of it. And so basically when we're talking about seed orientation, if we take a look at this seed here, this is our ultimate goal.

So the embryo of the seed here would be where your coleoptile is going to come and grow up out of, and the tip is where the Radicle, the beginning of your root system is going to grow down. And so when I'm tipped down, it allows more consistent and on timing because the Radicle and the coleoptile do not need to twist around the seed. Or if I land on my side or flat like this with the embryo up, yes, the Radicle will go down, coleoptile will come up, but it's still not quite that straight up shot where versus if I'm tip up, now they both have to twist 180 degrees to get down, delaying emergence or same thing with embryo down, I'm going to have to twist around. And so this is the ultimate goal would be tip down like this. You can see with our seed here, it'll highlight it green.

And so that's essentially what we're trying to do here with this technology. We can see over here on this stand here where we're actually using a camera at the base of it here just to show that we can see on the screen here how the seeds are landing. So the strong majority of them will be tip down as they land into the ground, into that furrow. And so it is also a high speed system. So not only are we able to orient the seeds as they come out, but we're spacing very well and I can speed this up. We can see there's a lot of seeds coming out, but we maintain the orientation and the spacing as we're going. This will be going through another beta testing phase this spring with some unlimited availability later this year. So stay tuned for those announcements.

Hi, my name's Eli Sloneker with Radicle Agronomics and PTx. Today we're looking at a couple products from Radicle Agronomics, which is our soil fertility soil analysis platform. So the first product we're going to look at today is a product called GeoPress. So what the GeoPress is it goes out in the field with you as you're collecting your soil samples and it's going to automatically package and geo-reference your soil samples for you. It does so in a little container called a geotube. So this is a reusable sample container. On the bottom of the geotube is an RFID tag where we store all the sample information on it. But again, that all takes place automatically with the GeoPress itself. And I'll show you quickly how that works. So the GeoPress interacts with our app called the Radicle App. So how this would work is you can import your soil testing zone, soil testing points.

So I could just create a quick grid map on there. And then as I'm going through the field, I collect my soil samples at one of these target point locations. The first thing I would do when I click my soil sample is I would run it through our soil grinder. So how that would work is I would open up this door, I would dump my soil cores into that door and as I close it, there's a grinder inside. It's going to chop up and mix that sample together. Basically what we're trying to do there is just mix the whole sample into one homogenous mix so we make sure we get a representative portion of that sample into the tube. Once that sample mixes, I would pull out the mug, so this would be filled with ground up soil. I'll dump that soil into the funnel here.

And then as soon as I lift up on the funnel, what the GeoPress does is it presses that soil down into the tube. And as soon as I lift up on that funnel, that geotube that I showed you also automatically geo references and places a little collection point there on the map where I collected that sample from. So as this GeoPress is doing its job there, I'm back on my side by side or ATV driving to my next soil collection location. And then by the time I get to my next point and get my next sample pulled, it's ready to load the next sample. One other version of the GeoPress that we have is called the GeoPress Lite. So it's a couple different parts here. One, we have a same sort of modular version of that soil grinder that we had over on the standard GeoPress, so doing the same job of blending up the soil.

The only difference with the GeoPress Lite is instead of the GeoPress automatically loading the tubes for me, with the GeoPress Lite, I just load one tube at a time by hand. How that would work is I would slide the cap on or off, I mean, slide it into the press. You can see the light turned blue there. So it sees the tube, it's ready to go. Once I grind up my soil, same process there, take my ground up soil, dump it into the funnel, and then I pull down on this handle. Once the GeoPress Lite sees that there's enough soil in that press, it's going to automatically trigger to right and georeference that sample. Same thing, dropping a collection point on the map there and georeferencing it and labeling it automatically. I just take that off, put the cap back on and then I can drive to my next sample location.

So the idea being that speeding up time in the field, speeding up the process, taking care of the labeling that's done by hand today. And then once these samples are collected, I could take them to a Radicle lab, which is an automated soil testing laboratory. Don't have that here today, but I could take it to a lab on my own or drop it off at a lab near me. Because everything is already stored on the sample container, I just load it on the lab, press the play button, walk away, and then as soon as the next day, I could have those results back to me in order to go make a fertilizer application. Available now, so anyone can get on the platform a couple different ways. If you're just interested in pulling your own samples for your farm, you can get set up with a GeoPress Lite or GeoPress, employ your own samples.

If there's a lab location near you, you can work with them to see if they'd be willing to pull the samples for you and kind of do the full service for you. So a lot of different ways to get on the platform, either pulling your own samples or working with a local lab. If you're interested in housing and operating a lab of your own for your own business or adding something to your business, we do have labs available as of right now as well.

Much more coverage from the National Farm Machinery Show in the coming days on striptillfarmer.com, but that'll wrap things up for this edition of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast. Big thanks once again to Yetter Farm Equipment for making this series possible. We appreciate their support. Until next time for all things strip-till head to striptillfarmer.com. And hey, if you want to check out some information about the upcoming National Strip-Tillage Conference, August 6th and 7th in Springfield, Illinois, head to striptillconference.com. We'll see you next time. Have a great day.