Almost 18% of no-tillers strip-till some of their acres according to our latest No-Till Farmer Benchmark Report.  On the other side of the coin, a whopping 68% of strip-tillers are no-tilling some of their acres, according to our latest Strip-Till Farmer Benchmark Report.

So, I figured there’d be at least some cross-over interest when I decided to add a “strip-till 101” classroom to January’s 2026 National No-Tillage Conference agenda. Pete Youngblut jumped at the chance to lead the session when I asked him back in September.

Youngblut, who strip-tills near Dysart, Iowa, and runs an independent farm equipment dealership, says there are “a lot of people” switching from strictly no-till to strip-till. But we both wondered how many people at a no-till event would attend a session strictly focused on strip-till.

To our surprise, there weren’t many empty seats as the room was packed with a mix of rookie strip-tillers, no-tillers considering strip-till and even a few experienced strip-tillers on hand to share their insights.

“When we’re talking about doing no-till and strip-till, it’s a conversation,” Youngblut said at the beginning of his presentation. “It’s not just, ‘Here’s what you do. This is the only way to do it and that’s it.’”

Youngblut got the conversation rolling with a basic definition of the practice. “Strip-till is a farming system that manages residue and provides controlled seedbed preparation to create the ideal growing environment in specific zones within a field,” he said. “You can do some tillage and still have conservation. You might have a narrow strip. It might not be that deep and it won’t necessarily wash away.”

Youngblut told me beforehand he was hoping the classroom would be more like an informative Q&A session than a presentation with endless PowerPoint slides. He got what he wished for, as attendees peppered him with questions about row units, fall vs. spring strip-till, soil sampling and fertilizer recommendations.

“The general rule of thumb is you can cut back roughly 20% on fertilizer,” he told attendees. “My opinion is take your soil samples, see what they show and then base it on that just like you would otherwise. But in a year like this with high input costs and low corn prices, you better believe I’m cutting back.”

One of the big takeaways from the classroom is that strip-till isn’t one-size-fits-all. It’s a system that needs to be tailored to the goals of your specific operation. And don’t expect strip-till to pitch a perfect game in its first season.

“Expect this to be a learning curve,” Youngblut said. “You’re not going to get everything perfect right out of the gate. If you’re expecting a silver bullet with a 50-bushel yield increase, pump the brakes a bit.

“You can adjust along the way. You might not use the same fertilizer. You might not like the job the row unit did, so you can tweak it. Maybe you’ll change your planter set-up because it doesn’t need to be as aggressive. Find someone to talk to who knows about strip-till.”

There’s only so much you can get to in an hour, but Youngblut did a great job covering what no-tillers should know about strip-till during the session. As attendees got up to leave, I let them know about the upcoming 2026 National Strip-Tillage Conference in Springfield, Ill., where they can learn much more about the practice. Is there a specific topic or speaker you’d like to see on the program? Let me know at NNewman@LessiterMedia.com.