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On this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, Pete Youngblut conducts a crash course on the boxes to check when implementing a strip-till system.
It’s been almost 40 years since Strip-Till Hall of Famer Cliff Roberts introduced many farmers to the concept of strip-till at the inaugural National No-Tillage Conference. Since then, strip-till has taken off as a popular practice with many adding it to their conservation toolbox.
On this episode of the podcast, listen in as Dysart, Iowa strip-tiller Pete Youngblut covers the basics of getting started with strip-till, including what to expect in the first year, the benefits of the practice and potential landmines to avoid. The owner of Youngblut Ag, an independent farm equipment dealership, also details what to consider when shopping for a strip-till rig and shares practical tips for strip-till success.
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.
Full Transcript
Noah Newman:
Hello and welcome to another edition of the Strip-Till Farmer Podcast brought to you by our good friends at Yetter Farm Equipment. My name is Noah Newman, managing editor of Strip-Till Farmer. And today, Pete Youngblood conducts a crash course on the boxes to check when implementing a strip-till system. So it's been almost 40 years since Strip-Till Hall of Famer Cliff Roberts introduced many farmers to the concept of strip-till at the inaugural National No-Tillage Conference. Of course, since then, strip-till has taken off as a popular practice with many adding it to their conservation toolbox. On this episode, we're going to listen in as Pete Youngblood takes the stage of the no-till conference to cover the basics of getting started with strip-till, including what to expect in the first year, the benefits of the practice, and of course, potential landmines to avoid. The owner of Youngblood Ag, an independent farm equipment dealership also details what to consider when shopping for a strip-till rig and share some practical tips for strip-till success.
Let's listen in.
Pete Youngblut:
Generally with strip-till, right out of the gate, there's a lot of assumptions made. Guys will go, "Well, you've got to use a shank unit. You're putting on dry and you're putting on anhydrous, and this is the only way it's done." And that's not the case. You can still do some tillage and have conservation. So we're not tilling a whole bunch of it. You may have a narrow strip, that strip may not be real deep, and it's not necessarily going to wash away. Back in Iowa where I'm from, we've got some rolling hills and people always worry about that. They go, "Well, what if we get a hard rain? It's just going to wash that strip out. It's way too mellow." And they're worried about all these things happening. So what we have to do is we actually have to break it down and go, "What is strip-till?" And I've had a lot of conversations about what that really means, and I'm going to borrow a definition from a colleague of mine, Andy Thompson, who worded it the best that I've heard.
Strip-till is a farming system that manages residue and provides controlled seed bed preparation to create the ideal seed-growing environment in specific zones within a field. Sounds kind of technical, but it's extremely accurate. So when we take that definition right down to it, there's a few key words. It's a system. It's not just one thing. It's managing residue and preparing a seed bed. And we're doing it within zones. In other words, meaning a strip, not tilling every inch of the soil. And so with that, you kind of have to understand what is it? How are we going to make this work? What works for us? Well, in that definition, did we say anything about fertilizer? I didn't, did we? It's because it doesn't have to be a fertilizer application. A lot of times it is, and I'm not saying that you can't do fertilizer, but in the actual definition, we're just trying to take care of that zone.
And the big key here is managing residue, which we will get to. There's very different systems with strip-till. You could be doing different kinds of fertilizer, different depths. Everything is going to be different depending upon your situation. Good example is in Iowa, we're pretty well known, especially in east central Iowa for really, really good ground, very deep top soil, things like that. I just talked to a gentleman here right before I started who is from Missouri and he says, "Yeah, we don't have that. We got a very thin layer of topsoil that we have to work with. So these types of things are very important to me." And so that's why you've got to kind of tailor to your own operation. And there's many, many different options out there so you can customize it. So if you're getting started, like we said here earlier, we're just getting into it, first thing that I'm going to ask you is what interests you about it?
The general rule of thumb is that you can cut back roughly 20%. The way personally, my opinion on it, take your soil samples, see what that shows, and then base it on that just like you would otherwise. But in a year like this year, you better believe I'm going to cut back. I mean, prices are high, corn's real low priced. What now would be the time to do it, but that's kind of your general rule of thumb. This was something I learned many years ago, helping guys do maps and variable rate. If you take a soil sample right here, okay, I've got it, I bag it, I'm going to send it to the lab and I move over here literally a foot or two and take a sample, they can be way different results. And that's very small movement and that's even if you're broadcasting.
So I wouldn't get too worried about the soil samples and exactly where I'm placing. And that's where it kind of comes back to a lot of this has to do with the residue as well and getting that moved. So we've talked about this, what interests you, which also kind of leads into that next question. What do you hope to accomplish? Seed bed prep was mentioned. Same thing with the last question there. What problems are we trying to solve? Nobody can spread fertilizer right. Well, that's a problem. And I'll be honest, I had that on our farm. That was what allowed me to finally get my dad to make the change because we had a fertilizer application and it was like, what is wrong with this field? You can see this big stripe right down the middle of a nice 80 and it's like, this is bad.
Corn looked terrible. Well, we finally got the data and they gave us the maps finally. They didn't really know what they were showing, but they also didn't know that I had a little bit of expertise in that area. They didn't apply down the center of the field. They had it, ran out of stuff, kept going. You could see where they refilled and then all of a sudden it was fine again. And it's like that gets pretty sticky, right? That's a bad situation. And I mean, you're talking could be legal, could be whatever else, that's a big problem. And obviously we lost a ton of bushels out of that deal. So taking strip till, now I'm able to control that and do what I need to do and we're able to balance it and fix it. So this has kind of come up and I think it's a common seed theme here, talking about the benefits of strip till.
So these are just ideas, things that if you're considering moving to strip till, there's a few ideas in this. Residue and seed bed. So the big key, and I mentioned this a little bit ago, has to do with residue.
What's one of the big things that you're going to put on your planter if you're no-tilling? Bingo. What are we doing with a row cleaner? Managing the residue, right? We're trying to move that out of the way so that that row unit can operate properly and get into the ground. How many of you guys do cover crops? Quite a few. We do as well. That creates a lot of residue, no matter what species you're putting down, maybe you've applied it that we've tried that. It gets a little sparse here and there depending upon the pilot, but that's going to be broad coverage, a drill. I get a lot of people that will ask me about drill spacings and placing a strip in between and getting very technical and you can, but with strip till, that's going to allow me to move that residue as well and start preparing that seed bed.
And as was mentioned earlier, I want a warmer, better seed bed. That's what strip till is doing for you. And we'll get into some of the row units and what the differences are, but the general rule here is that if we can move all the residue to the side, we can go through, warm that soil up with that tillage action and we're going to be able to plant sooner. In our operation, that's been a big thing. Before strip till, we were always waiting. The new hybrids and stuff, I mean, there's a lot of trash out there, so we're waiting. We're trying to do it with the planter or we go and then it's like, man, our row cleaners are moving this stuff, but it's still tacky underneath and that can create some issues. So this is going to allow us to take care of that.
And you can see in the one picture here, how that's clean and how that seed's perfectly placed, and that's what we're going for. So with a lot of the new hybrids, what do we hear a lot about? We hear how well they stand, right? Well, this isn't going to blow over in a big wind and so on and so forth. Well, those stalks have such strength in them that residue's taken more to break down. So that's how we end up with so much trash. And of course, different hybrids act differently. Some will be kind of a die and dry. So you're going through with the combine and there's not much there left on the plant. All the leaves are on the ground. Other ones, you're pulling in a ton of trash through that combine. So it's about that breakdown and how much residue we get out there compared to what we're used to in the past when we weren't growing nearly as high bushel of corn.
I talked with a few colleges years ago about variable rate seeding and what's the right way to do it? And basically the answers that I've always gotten out of people that are way smarter than me is that it's a moving target. You would have to run tons of trials over every acre to kind of figure out what the perfect answer is. But of course on your lower productivity soils where, hey, I'm going to get 150 bushel corn, that's it. Doesn't matter how many plants I put out there, you can back that rate off. You got really productive soils. You may turn that rate up and find that threshold where now we're getting smaller ears because it wasn't allowed to flex out. But that density, I think we've seen it and obviously our seed salesmen love it. They're going, "Yeah, plant more, plant more." Well, as that's gained over the years, we're going to have more trash out there as well.
So the next big thing is fertilizer application. And we've kind of mentioned this already. We can place this fertilizer where we want it. We can actually apply it ourselves, so we're going to gain some control. And like you mentioned, how much can I pull back on my rates? Can I apply less because I'm only doing a 10 inch strip instead of 30 inches wide? Can I cut that way back? And you can, so that's going to save us a lot of money. I also look at it, that's why I got the dollar signs up here. It costs me if I'm going to do a tillage pass, it costs me if I've got to pay somebody to apply, how many times do they have to go across it and can I reduce those? If I'm paying 10, 12 bucks for an application and I got to pay them to go over it twice, or I'm paying for an anhydrous bar or something like that and paying for a floater, that stacks up pretty quick, right?
Well, I might as well just take that money and put it in my pocket, put it towards a bar, I own it, I control it and we don't have misapplications. I've had guys that will tell me there is no way you can put it in the top two inches and you have to go deep. It's got to be placed that six, eight inches deep. I'll be perfectly honest with you and say that I disagree with that answer. I'm not going to say that it's 100% wrong or that you shouldn't do it that way, but it doesn't mean we have to. So that's why I mentioned right out of the gate in these slides that there's different systems. We have a lot of guys in our area that first thing they jump to is a Koon Krause Gladiator. That's the popular one, that and soil warrior.
Are they bad machines? Absolutely not. They're great machines. But I'm in that situation where we had one tractor on the farm that was an MX 285. So what you're talking about, we run a 1631 Kinsey planter. It does great on that. Well, I wanted to be able to pull the bar. We were looking at getting another tractor anyways so we could move into this, but do I want to spend three, $400,000 on a tractor because I need the size and the horsepower or could I get something more similar to what I have already? Well, I still want to pull 16 rows, so we looked into other options and it can be done. When I'm doing my fertilizer, max depth of my row unit is four inches. So I'm running it in the fall doing my P&K because it's a twin bin machine coming back in the spring, hitting it with urea and AMS, put it in the strip and go.
Running eight to nine mile an hour, no problem. And I didn't have to go out and buy another horse to do it. So it can be done. So another big benefit with strip till is that it will help your other operations.
That means the planter, side dress, fertilizer, spraying, all of these things. You can see the picture of the planter there and you can see those nice dark strips. That's actually not from a strip till machine. That is the row cleaners on that planter. We struggled with that. We started out with really good row cleaners. We were able to move and make the planter function the way that we wanted, but it was wet underneath and we've got cover crop growing there. Well, with strip till, we're able to keep our cover crop. That's going to help the sprayer out, right? By making the strip, warming that up, getting it ready to go, that's going to take some effort out of our planter. That means maybe we don't have to do quite as many attachments or different things with the planter. We can let the planter plant, right?
How many guys put liquid on their planter? Quite a few. Okay. This gives us the option to put some of that fertilizer up front and put it in the strip so that we don't have to. As I mentioned, ours is a 1631 Kinsey, means it's lift and rotate. I'm not real inclined to put tanks on that thing and trying to plumb tanks on the tractor and run it all the way back, that's just a struggle for our operation. And I just use that as an example. So strip till has allowed me to put the fertilizer in the strip, not have to carry it on the planter, saves a step. So you're helping other operations out. Now with every system, there's challenges, right? It's not perfect. If it was perfect, everybody would do it. So what are some of these things that you're going to see and run into questions that I have on the I can't?
Because you can and you can do anything you want, but it's not so much a can't. So you run into challenges like time, hence the reason speed is nice. I can cover acres quickly. If anybody has a high speed planter, really boosted productivity when you're planting in it. I mean, now I'm doing the work of a 24 row with a 16 and that's nice. Same thing comes into play with the strip till bar.
You'd asked about the bar, that's ours right there. That's a 16 row. We've got nine ton of dry capacity with a front assist tractor. You're going to run into challenging things with time and weather. How many acres can I get done? Am I going to beat the frost? That's a tough one. This year was a very good example for us back home. Got done with combining, went straight into strip till, laid my strips down, thought, okay, now we're going to get in, do some tiling in some places, get that stuff out of the way. Wasn't quite as critical and I didn't even get to put it in the ground. It was bang, went from 50 degrees and sunny to 20 degrees and wet, raining. That happens, especially if you're in Iowa, like we always say, if you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes and it'll change.
So that stuff happens. It's always a challenge. Humidity, I've seen guys mix wrong products, things get sticky and slimy in the lines, those kind of things too. Tenders aren't cheap if you're going to buy your own. One, you got to have the truck. Two, you got to have the tender, and three, it's got to fit. Our struggle is trying to get up over top of that montage. Those things are tall, especially when it's riding on the toolbar itself. So I'm lucky. I work real close with our local co-op and they take fantastic care of me because we kind of partner together. That's why I got a calendar spot shown on here. So you can do it. It can be done if you work with the guys on it. There's days that are windy as all get out. Well, they can't run a floater on those days, right?
But I can definitely run a strip till bar. So they're like, "Hey, we'll give you a call and we can work together on this. You can have the tender, just use it all day, keep coming back." So usually it's my brother or my dad that will run the tender truck. He's driving back and forth and it's just a tandem axle truck that they usually give us. They don't give us the big fancy semi, but that gives me fill and a half roughly. So what I'll do is I'll go hammer a few acres out and as soon as I've got enough poundage off that I can fit the rest of the truck, I'm going back and reloading. And then that keeps that truck moving. But it's a logistical thing. You have to plan for it. And this year, holy cow, was I nervous about it? So everybody's got stuff going.
This year we got by, but it wasn't easy. So it can be done.
Noah Newman:
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Pete Youngblut:
One of the next challenges. Now I'm assuming mostly everybody in here probably has GPS of some sort. Anybody that's just getting started with GPS and guidance stuff? Okay. That's kind of what I expected. Everybody's got the tech. I work heavily in that space back home, but the question is always, what do I need to do strip till? A common question is, well, if I'm doing that, I have to have RTK, I have to have implement guidance, I have to have all these lines, I have to do all this stuff and it's all got to be perfect. Well, we can relax a little bit. It ain't got to be absolutely pinpoint perfect. Does it make a difference? Does it keep our operation at ease, a little less stressful? Yes, it does. If you've got a good guidance system and a good monitor set up that everybody on the operation is familiar with, that's going to ease a lot of pain when it comes to putting your strips down.
There's a learning curve to it. We had an issue where you can see in this picture, so that's an ISO controller shown up on an ag leader screen and we run ag leader in our equipment and then it's a compatibility question. Well, montags generally will come with an ISO rate controller, which is compatible with ag leader, deer, case, whoever it is.
ISO's the pioneer coupler of precision ag, but he wasn't familiar with it. So my brother wasn't familiar with it. I was. He goes out. I'm like, "Hey, shouldn't you be running out?" "Well, I don't know. ""What's your rate say?" "Well, 250. "So dude, that's supposed to be 500. We can go back and we can account for it, but what are you doing? So operator experience, keeping it consistent through everybody is definitely going to help, making sure that it's an easy system to learn. And if you plan it, take the little bit of time, drive your boundaries, make your guidance lines, make sure they're going to work and save them. That management is something that, man, I deal with that every single day. And if somebody doesn't have that done, it can be really stressful. I know that when I got out with the planner, my brother had done strips.
I came back with the planner and I'm trying to find the line. Well, he made a whole bunch of them and it wasn't necessary, but he had done it a lot different than I would have. And I'm going, "What line did he use trying to figure it out so that I can make sure I'm on the right spot?" So in a strip-till system, you definitely want to use a higher level of guidance. It's not going to make it steer any different, but it's going to be more repeatable. So there's accuracy and there's repeatability, and a lot of people will get confused with that. They go, "Well, the common term is RTK." You hear that a lot, right? You hear WAS, you hear RTK or SF1, SF2, SFRTK, different brands and stuff there. You're definitely wanting at least go mid-range or RTK. I definitely say that's worth the money.
If nothing else, it's at least going to be worth it because you got the repeatability. It's not the pass to pass that we're looking for in that situation because there's pass to pass, which is your accuracy. That's am I going to come back in 15 minutes and it's moved three feet? We're obviously going to gain the accuracy with it, but it's the repeatability that's critical because if I can come back and hit that same exact spot within an inch year over year, that's going to make it way easier to deal with.
Another one of those things that you get into is then implement guidance that's becoming more prevalent. Cost, we talked about that a little bit ago with $300,000 tractor. Tool bars aren't cheap. There's tool bars that are half a million bucks out there depending on how they're equipped. You can use different things real quickly. I mean, obviously you've got the return on the investment from not having to pay somebody else to apply. You've got NRCS has programs out there you can get paid by adopting strip till. That's going to help cover some of your costs, your fertilizer coming down, those kind of things, but it's not going to be a cheap thing. So for anybody getting started, there's a reason this is a mess. Where do you start? What questions do you ask? What do you do? And we've kind of worked through a lot of this and there's a ton of questions.
Those were just ones off the top of my head that I've heard. Do your homework and make some decisions right away. The more you can tell me, if I'm the guy sitting here trying to help you decide on something, the more you can tell me upfront, the quicker and easier we can narrow down the list of what tool is going to be there. Know what your goals are. What have we heard so far? I want to take control of my fertilizer. I want a better seed bed. I want to handle this trash. I want to be able to pull 16 rows and not 12. I want to do it with a smaller tractor. Those kind of things. You got to figure out how it's going to fit for you. So here's your variables. We've kind of gone through these already. That timing is a big one, fall, spring, or like in our case, I'm doing it both because like Andy pointed out here a little bit ago, that trash is going to move around.
Wind blows, snow, so on. I'm doing it both ways. So when you're doing this stuff, I'm going to look at it and one of the first questions I'm asking you is going to have to do with fertilizer. Are you going to do it or not? If not, we've just taken a huge piece of that puzzle that we don't have to include, right? So that's a simple, straightforward one there. The next question is going to be if you're going to apply fertilizer, what kind are you going to apply? And this is where some of those other challenges come into play. In our case, I'm a dry only setup. I get along with it well. I'm happy with it. It does what we need to do. However, how am I going to handle it? Do I need other equipment of my own? What's that stuff going to cost?
Can I coordinate with somebody? Those kind of things come into question. So maybe I want a liquid program.
That can work just as well. Personally, I'm not huge on NH3. I feel what I have seen, and I've seen this a lot and have quite a few customers that have had the same result, you'll find that when you quit applying NH3 and you do your covers and switch programs, all of a sudden you're getting gopher holes and stuff in your field. Well, what is that a sign of? Tells me that my biology is back. So they're digging, they're looking for grubs and whatever else. So we are able to move to a drier liquid and save a lot of that biology. I'm not going to say that one is better than the other per se, but more of a what's going to fit you the best, what's easier for you? You may say that liquid's way easier because I already got tanks and pumps and stuff for the sprayer, so I can handle it that way and it's cheaper and easier for me to do and I don't have the cost of the dry bin to deal with on the machine.
So now maybe I'm getting into a hundred to machine, $200,000 machine as compared to 250 or 300 or more. So it's those kind of things. So the row unit type, that's why I asked the fertilizer question first is you got two types here. So I'm most familiar with the Yetter line. So we're showing a Maverick and a strip freshener CC there. Those are two drastically different approaches. A knife, that's where the question came in earlier, do we have to go eight inches deep? If you're going to go that deep, there are some coulter machines out there that will do that and they have a different action. But if you're pulling gas, that means you're going to go with a knife. And that means you're going to look at that kind of a row unit. I'm not going to put gas on with a CC, but they're going to act a lot different.
So that's where if you can decide what product you have, we can move into row units. My preference is more a coulter machine and going a little shallower because I actually want some soil structure there.
Neighbor of mine ended up, just a chance deal, had to switch tractors. Tractor was set out wide and it was riding on the strips a little bit. He ran a shank unit. We got a wind and he had these two rows every 40 feet perfect that were standing and the rest of the field was flat. It took out that compaction, but since he did it with a knife in the spring, it was so mellow, roots had nothing to adhere to. So by timing that and deciding when to go and what to do, it'll make a big difference. And if you're fighting a lot of compaction stuff, then maybe you want a shank unit. Maybe you need to break that up and your soil's going to adhere better, but different soil types, different areas of course. So the next thing there is how is your planter set up?
This is stuff to take into account with strip till because there's certain things that maybe you need or don't need. Of course, if we're coming from no-till, how do you think it's going to be set up? Probably set up to handle no-till conditions, right? So guys might have coulters on there. They're obviously going to have row cleaners, that's going to be a big one. Are we running a downforce system and how's that going to act? We've got hydraulic downforce on ours and it's a huge difference. When I go into beans, I'm no-tilling my beans, I wouldn't go without it. It's basically a must on our farm because of the return we see on it. But then when I get into the strips, that thing acts totally different because it's softer, it's mellower, I don't need the row unit to push down so hard. So you can do this stuff kind of in tandem.
I can set up my planner to work with no-till or strip-till and they're going to be different.
When you're going into strip-till, this is where I brought up the gladiator earlier. There's a fast replacer on there and then there's our rig again, which is totally custom. That's a land lover bar with a montage on top and yet our CC unit's on the back. I built it. You can do whichever. A lot of guys like that easy button of, "Hey, I can get it." I walk into the implement dealership, it's a standard product. I didn't have to pick out the options. You can do that, but it's not required. We talked a little bit about considerations with precision. The biggest part of this is going to be in the rate control side when you're considering this stuff because different brands play nice with different things. I can't run a John Deere rate controller and plug it into my ag leader. It's not going to function that way.
So it's something to consider and take into account. Expect this to be a learning curve.
You're not going to get it right perfectly right out of the gate. So if a guy's going to go, "Well, yep, we're going into strip till and I'm going to expect a 50 bushel increase and I'm going to save all this fertilizer and this is silver bullet," pump the brakes a little bit. You can make adjustments, you can change things. You may not use the same fertilizer. You may not like the job that the row unit did, so I need to make some changes with it, tweak some things. I need to change the way my planner's set up because hey, I don't need to be so aggressive.
Maybe I want to lift the row cleaners a little bit, something like that. But you can adjust things and change over time. We just want to do a good job. So that's where I kind of come back to what do you really truly need to know versus all the details. And we actually managed to come into a lot of details today, which is great. But if you're going to break it down and make it simple, it's not just a, "Hey, if I go buy this, everything's going to be perfect," type situation. Make careful decisions. Think about what you want, what fits you, and how are we going to do it? You can always make adjustments, and if you plan properly, you're going to set yourself up for success.
Noah Newman:
Great stuff as always from Pete Youngblood. Thanks so much for tuning in. That'll do it for this episode of the Strip Till Farmer Podcast. And thanks, of course, once again to Yetter Farm Equipment for making this podcast series possible. Until next time, for all things strip-till, head to striptillfarmer.com. I'm Noah Newman. Have a great day.
