When Zack Smith first proposed transitioning his family’s Lake Mills, Iowa, farm to strip-till in 2011, his father was hesitant.
“I'll never forget it,” Smith says. “I told my folks, ‘Listen, if you want me to take over this farm in the future, this is how I'm going to do it. You're either with me or without me. I'm going to go buy a strip-till rig.’ They weren't very happy with me, but they decided if I was this passionate about it, they’d give me some rope to hang myself with, and they agreed to come along to buy the bar.”
Smith chose a Kuhn Krause Gladiator strip-till bar, and his parents purchased the RTK and a used Montag fertilizer cart. He strip-tilled about a third of the family’s acres in fall of 2011 and planted in spring of 2012, a “really interesting year to have as our first year,” Smith says. As many know, 2012 brought historic drought comparable to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
Smith’s father was curious about how strip-till would perform on corn-on-corn compared to conventional, so they strip-tilled 15 acres in an 80-acre field and moldboard plowed the rest. Dry fertility and anhydrous went into the strips. The same amount of anhydrous was moldboard plowed on the rest of the field, plus it received two cultivator passes prior to planting. At the end of the growing season, the Smiths had a 30-foot side-by-side trial of strip-till corn-on-corn vs. conventional corn-on-corn.
“We got done combining, I walked over to the cart and climbed up into the cab, and my dad wouldn't look at me,” Smith says. “He was staring at the scale. He looked at his phone, and he looked back at the scale, and there was just silence.
“I just sat there, and finally he said to me, forgive the vulgarity, ‘Wipe that goddamn smile off your face,’ because we both knew what the result was. The strip-till was 27 bushels per acre better than the conventional tillage.”
After that, Smith’s father embraced strip-till, and today, the operation is 100% strip-till.
“I would rather quit farming than go away from the strip-till system,” Smith says. “Have we got it all figured out? No. Is it always easy? No, but the good of the system outweighs the bad.”
To help other farmers adopt strip-till — or convince their family to give the practice a chance — Smith shares these five tips:
1. Do your homework before switching to strip-till.
“Take a year or two to get prepared. The people who are the least successful are the ones who haven’t thought through all the processes or made sure their machinery is lined up.”
2. Talk to your neighbors who strip-till.
“Talk to local people who know what they’re doing. Most people, especially at conferences like the National Strip-Tillage Conference, are willing to share and help folks out.”
3. Build consensus within your operation.
“If you’re farming with family members, it’s really important to have them all on board when you make the decision to strip-till. I’ve seen it too many times where someone gets dragged into it and is almost cheering when something doesn’t go well, so they can go back to the old way of doing things. If you want to be successful, you’ve got to be able to sell the value of what you’re doing to everybody involved in the operation.”
4. Strip-till for the right reasons.
“Do it because you want to make your farm more resilient and less prone to erosion, your soil healthier and your yield more stable. Don’t do it for a NRCS payment or a 45Z tax credit potentially coming back from an ethanol plant someday. Those things are great, but you’ll be disappointed if everything hinges on those extra dollars. You need to believe in what you’re doing to get through the bad days.”
5. Burn the ships.
“Get rid of all the equipment that could tempt you to go back and do it the old way, especially if you have other people involved in the operation. When things don’t go well, oftentimes they’ll hit the easy button and want to go back to what’s comfortable. I don’t have a field cultivator, a plow or a ripper anymore. I like having the barrier of having to go rent it from my neighbor to keep me on pace.”
