Bigshot Tillage Trends

[BA Deere]

Once again I`m left behind with my fall tillage practices, forever eating my lunch at the uncool table 🙂 I`ve got ridges and residue in the fields, but anybody who`s anybody has their fields worked up like a garden, smooth as a baby`s bottom ready to plant right today.

I was busy with my own so I can`t tell you exactly what happened, one day the bigshots were out with their EarthMaster and of course there`s ridges and residue just like "Ames" tells us it should be.  But, after that magic happened and it got leveled off, residue buried and it`s going into winter fit to be planted.

I always thought you wouldn`t want your field black and smooth going into winter in case it`s a open winter or a dry spring to blow the soil.  But what do I know, I didn`t get the memo  🙂

[buckfarmer]

Recreational tillage?

[tree fmr]

Do all our tillage with the combine. Crops are out and fields ready to plant!

[Shaggy98]

Tillage? Why would you waste your time and deplete your soil? Tillage for corrective reasons is understandable, I didn't realize how damaging it was until I started no-tilling.

[tree fmr]

Yeah Shaggy we have been no till for 20+ years but if you ask the farmer across the fence it doesn't work. Never understood how one can say that after watching it this many years. Tile guy sure likes how mellow the soil is too! Says he goes 2X as fast on our ground.

[BA Deere]

I think since this area was so hard hit with prevent plant, many are still fighting last year`s battle.  Come April 10th, they just want be able to drag the planter across the field and hit the ground running.  If it`s a open winter and dry spring, the ditches will have a foot of Iowa`s finest in them.

I kid you not, it`s as if they chopped the stalks, disced them moldboard plowed 12" deep, disced again and field cultivated twice.  If they did all that, the fields wouldn`t be any blacker or finely worked.

[idalivered]

BA, you and i would get along just fine. I'm always amazed that it take a $65000 ripper to grow soybeans. I'll ask, does an old ripper or ccolter chisel limit soybean yields?? My old ripper with campbell levelers leaves the soil level enough for me to aplly trefaln next spring, first pass. what else do i want?I'm not talking coc , just soys. I molboarded some coc and used a dmi 730 on other coc acres. I will have my first striptill coc next year, too. I know we will get alot of notill comments, but ba and i live where tillage is still extensive. notill can (not always) be a liability.

[Shaggy98]

What type of liability IDA?

FWIW, I still own a full line of tillage equipment, I just choose to let it set.

Tillage is still extensive in this neck of the woods as well, but when the conventional till milo was about 70-75 percent lodged this year compared to 15-20 percent lodging in the no-till milo, well even the long term conventional tillers are starting to take notice. It's never to late to change, Col. Sanders didn't open KFC until he was in his 70's.

[tree fmr]

All that fall tillage just to take PP the next spring.  All forms of farming have liabilities.