Every equipment pass risks soil compaction, a problem that affects root and crop growth, water infiltration, crop fertility access and your bottom line. But many management practices exist to help fix compaction and avoid it in the future.

“Ann Marie Journey presented at our field day, and in 10 minutes she taught us more about corn rootworm than any retailer has ever taught us in our life,” says Jon Stevens, Rock Creek, Minn., strip-tiller. Journey, an independent soil, wetland and stream health evaluator and founder of EntoVentures LLC, brings her wealth of knowledge about the “billion dollar bug” to the National Strip-Tillage Conference.

During his career as a full-time agronomist, Randy Bump learned early on that strip-till was a winner no matter the soil type, so much so that he went all in on the reduced tillage practice when he returned to his family’s 1,000-acre Albany, Wis., farm in 2014.

Brian Watkins, a sixth generation strip-tiller from Kenton, Ohio, applies a true “dollars and cents” mentality to managing his 7,000-acre corn, soybean, winter wheat and livestock operation.

See the future of strip-till and farm technology in this special session spotlighting not-yet-ready but cutting-edge product innovations. You’ll be able to evaluate these technologies from the questions (and answers) as your peers digest their application to their farms.

When asked by a crop consultant toinvestigate herbicide-resistant waterhemp in Dodge County, Wis., Dr. Rodrigo Werle and his research team discovered that label-rate applications of PPO herbicides just weren’t getting the job done.

Strip-tiller Robert Boyle deals with drought conditions every year in Coolidge, Ariz. His 1,200-acre corn, cotton, alfalfa and dairy operation gets only about 7 inches of rain — if he’s lucky — and it often comes over the course of 2-3 storms.

After a 44-year run as co-owner and president of Case IH dealer Johnson Tractor in Wisconsin and Illinois, Leo Johnson retired to pursue his lifelong dream of farming with his wife, Sue. Although he has an extensive knowledge of equipment, Johnson was a novice at almost everything else when he started farming 1,000 acres of corn and soybeans in southern Wisconsin.

Watch as we recognize the second class of the Strip-Till Hall of Fame inductees including Jodi DeJong-Hughes, David Legvold and Bill Preller! Each inductee makes an impassioned speech on the importance of strip-till in their lives and what joining the hall of fame means to them.