No-Till Farmer Blog

We often talk about the value of soil porosity and soil biology, and we talk about macropores and earthworms, but a video taken by Dave Robison of Cisco Seeds really did a nice job of visually portraying a good soil profile built upon high earthworm populations (and numerous earthworm channels), the benefits of cover crops, good tile drainage and more.

In this video, you can see smoke from a diesel engine that’s pumped into pressurized tile emerging from the macropores of a corn field. It’s a pretty neat site to see the smoke rising up from the soil. You can see more videos at www.plantcovercrops.com.

Frank Gibbs, NRCS soils specialist, presented this experiment in Williams County, Ohio.

Last night, I didn’t watch President Obama’s speech on his economic plan. After the first few minutes of watching enthusiastic applause for the President from the members of the House and Senate, and others, I just couldn’t bare to watch it. Our elected leaders deserve our respect, but count me as one of many individuals who are having trouble putting my faith in government. It just seems that too many politicians are living in their own little world inside the Beltway, oblivious to the real world outside D.C.

Today, I received an e-mail from one of the communications agencies I correspond with regularly that offered a video of the Birds Point Levee disaster this past spring. Watching this video once again reminded me why I probably felt the way I did Thursday night as the President was about to address the nation.

While I realize the Army Corps of Engineers believes it was proper to blow several holes in the levee to avert a possible disaster in Cairo, Ill., what it did to the farmland and communities in the New Madrid flood zone has been nothing short of disastrous. It appears some of the assumptions they made were just flat-out wrong, and the damage to this area may be far greater than anticipated.

I don’t have all the facts; this is just one view of the disaster. But the video suggests that our government that created the disaster in this area — the disaster didn’t occur naturally, it was the government that decided when and where the disaster would hit — has not done anything for the people whose lives were impacted.

Watch the video. You’ll see some amazing images of soil erosion and destruction, and you’ll hear how devastating this event has been on folks impacted by the Birds Point Levee disaster.

I have three boys who play baseball. If you want any better explanation of how no-till can help your farm’s soils, all you need to do is see some of the baseball fields my boys play on.

This past week, our home field with its all-dirt infield was as hard as concrete. In fact, it would have been easier to use dynamite to find the post for second base. It took a lot of effort to dig up the dirt with a spaded shovel.

When I told my wife just how horrible of shape that field was in (not to mention you could see an erosion gulley near the third-base line), she said she was surprised because we’ve had a lot of rain and she thought that would have loosened up the soil.

That got me to thinking that perhaps a lot of no-till unbelievers must have the same perception.

Here’s the reality. It was because we’ve had so much rain that the exposed dirt was that hard. It had taken a pounding from rain and once it dried and baked under the sun, it became concrete. Imagine your seedling plants trying to emerge through that hard layer.

Folks talk a lot about the cost, time and fuel savings of no-till, but a bigger benefit, in my opinion, is that the residue — or trash, as some skeptics say — actually absorbs the force of the rain and protects the soil.

Yes, there are some definite things you need to manage in no-till that you don’t need to deal with in a tillage system. That takes effort, a willingness to learn, some patience and creative thinking.

But all you need to do is walk in a long-term no-till field and the skin infield of a local baseball field to see and feel the difference.

It’s good to see that the American farmer is doing more with less. In this case, they’re growing more corn with fewer amounts of applied fertilizer.

To be certain, they’re getting more technology from the ag industry to help hit those higher yields. That said, the Fertilizer Institute says that corn production has nearly doubled in the past 30 years with slightly fewer nutrients used than in 1980.

No-tillers are leading the way. For example, in our 3rd annual No-Till Practices survey answered by 502 No-Till Farmer readers, nearly 60% said they were applying less than 1 pound of nitrogen to reach their expected yield goal. That’s quite a bit less than the 1.2 pounds-per-bushel teachings of the past.

When you consider the public scrutiny farmers are placed under — some of it unfair, when you think of the fertilizer many of these same critics might apply to their lawns and see run off into storm sewers during heavy rain events — there are signs that farmers, in general, are much more responsible than given credit.

“Efficient food production and protection of the environment are not mutually exclusive goals,” says Fertilizer Institute president Ford West. “While our critics’ voices are often louder than our advocates, the numbers don’t lie. This new data shows yet one more reason that agriculture is a leader in environmental stewardship.”

I expect no-tillers to keep leading the effort to be more and more efficient with nutrients and raise the standards. It’s important that they take that leadership role.

While traveling through the Western Corn Belt with No-Till Farmer managing editor John Dobberstein last week, I got the opportunity to walk on seven no-till farms over the course of 3 days — three in Nebraska, one in northwest Missouri and three in western Iowa.

We found that most of the farms were using anhydrous ammonia as their nitrogen source — a decision primarily made because that’s what the local fertilizer dealer carries. However, it was interesting to see one farm taking a totally different approach.

Kent and Steve Krause from Adams, Neb., were applying all of their fertilizer at one time with the planter.Their 16-row Kinze no-till planter applies both starter fertilizer and 10-34-0.

According to Steve Krause, who runs the no-till planter, they mix the fertilizers together and apply from both the tanks on the planter and one on a trailer towed behind the planter. The fertilizer is applied through a coulter in a 2-by-2-inch placement alongside the seed.

While applying fertilizer at-plant slows down planting considerably, the Krauses say they are eliminating one pass across the field. Pulling a cart takes some of the weight off the planter — and keeps it off the tractor as well. They say they are not concerned about compaction because the soils in long-term no-till fields, along with the residue on the surface, seem to absorb the weight. They also eliminate safety concerns using anhydrous.

One of the nice payoffs for the Krauses is that they’ve found their applied nitrogen rates are 80% of theirexpected corn yield goals and they are not as concerned about losing nutrients to leaching or denitrification.

To borrow a word from Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, I’m not going to “bloviate” too much on this topic. I’m much more interested in what you as farmers think. But just beware that farmers are getting their eyes blackened a little bit in the past week by a couple stories making the rounds.

First, there was a story about farmland soil erosion in the Des Moines Register last Wednesday that’s been filtering around the Internet. Check it out here. It’s the ugly photo — something that I would think our No-Till Farmer readers would find offensive — that’s not making farmers look too good.

Second, I just read a Fox News story about farm subsidies perhaps coming under the knife. You can read it here. While we can try to justify farm subsidies because of competitive imbalances with farmers in other countries, the fact that we have a government that needs its spending to go on a major diet before we mortgage our children’s future, along with an ag economy that has prospered in comparison to the general economy, it’s going to be awfully hard to tell the general U.S. public suffering from high unemployment levels that these farm subsidies need to continue.

However, the question begs to be asked. Why not scrap the current farm subsidy programs for ones that encourage farmers to move toward conservation-tillage practices like no-till and strip-till?

If high diesel fuel prices aren’t enough to make farmers cut down on the trips across the field and no-till, certainly a U.S. public that likes the idea of farmers being more conservation-minded by using less diesel fuel and using soil-saving practices ought to get them behind a program that encourages farmers to no-till.

Or how about subsidizing farmers to plant cover crops that can capture nutrients in the soil so they can be used by the next cash crop, or help hold that valuable soil in place so sediment and nutrients don’t end up in watersheds?

While I realize farmers who have shown the ingenuity and the dedication to no-till may not benefit as much from these types of programs as farmers who first embrace these practices, don’t you think we’d all be better off encouraging these practices and using our tax dollars more wisely?

If you were the President or the Secretary of Ag for a day, what would you propose?

When Al Gore invented the Internet (yes, you do detect a hint of sarcasm here), he probably had no idea what a powerful tool it would become. You can access so much information, so quickly, it’s really quite unbelievable.

Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of information you find on the Internet is — it’s unbelievable. For example, the creation of blogs has not necessarily been a good thing because a lot of people posing as legitimate, credible reporters are offering up a lot of misinformation. (That should serve as a reminder to myself of the awesome responsibility journalists have.)

So, just because you read it on the Internet doesn’t means it’s true. That said, we were left scratching our head when we read an introductory statement on a John Deere Web site page about Sustainable Agriculture.

The text on this Web page begins like this: “Why would John Deere — the company founded on the invention of the plow — pioneer no-till farming practices?” (Note: Click on the Sustainable Agriculture tab to see this Web page.)

To me, that statement claims that John Deere didn’t just pioneer the first equipment made for the no-till industry, but it apparently pioneered the practice itself.

For an opinion of that, I went to no better source than Frank Lessiter himself, who has been the editor of No-Till Farmer for all 40 years of the publication’s existence.

It’s been long held that Harry Young Jr. of Herndon, Ky., was among the first farmers to practice no-tillage in 1962. He used a home-rigged Allis-Chalmers planter to no-till 0.2 acres of corn.

In fact, Harry’s son, John, conducted a classroom session at the National No-Tillage Conference in January on no-tilling wheat. If you want more history on Harry Young, check out this Web page. It includes a photo of John standing next to an historical marker on the farm.

Even John is quick to credit that his father got the idea of no-till from somewhere else. During his classroom session, John noted that his dad saw a small test plot in 1961 at Dixon Springs, Ill., conducted by George McKibben. And even before McKibben, the author Edward Faulkner wrote The Plowman’s Folly.

So, I guess we’re not quite willing to hand over the trophy of “No-Till Pioneers” to John Deere. Even from an equipment perspective, Allis-Chalmers appears to have taken a look at Harry Young’s modified no-till corn planter and been the first company to manufacture and market a corn planter specific to no-till. In 1966, they introduced the first fluted-coulter no-till planter.

Let’s not dismiss the fact that years later, John Deere made an extremely popular no-till drill — the 750 — that has stood the test of time, or that it has designed some popular no-till corn planters in its day.

But to be the self-proclaimed “pioneers of no-till,” this just appears to be pat-on-the-back marketing spin. Besides, everybody knows that Al Gore invented no-till.

Our latest No-Till Farmer poll reveals that GPS and precision tools, as well as row unit attachments are the two most common categories of farm equipment that no-tillers are purchasing ahead of the 2011 production season.

Some 49% of poll respondents said they had either purchased or were planning to purchase some type of GPS-related precision tool. That’s quite a strong number and is just further evidence that no-tillers are becoming more familiar and/or interested in this technology. Efficiency and a better bottom line are certainly drivers in this line of technology.

While at the National Farm Machinery Show this past week, Derek Allensworth of Yetter  Mfg. Co. said that they were essentially moving every piece of attachment tool they were manufacturing. The Dawn Equipment Co. booth was its customary busy self, and Jim Bassett added that business was very good. The same with Brian Freed of Ag Focus.

Some 36% of the no-tillers participating in our poll said they were going to purchase row unit attachments for their planters or drills. And apparently, no-till planters are looking quite attractive as well, with 29% of respondents saying they were going to purchase a no-till planter.

If you’d like to see results of the entire survey, just click here.

Ray Ward, a speaker at the 2010 National No-Tillage Conference and owner of Ward Laboratories, tipped me off to this little nugget at last week’s No-Till on the Plains meeting in Salina, Kan. Right now, if Nebraska no-tillers go to pull soil samples in their fields, they need to call Digger’s Hotline.

Apparently, state utility companies recently began raising a fuss that activities like soil sampling, soil cores and soil water monitoring installations were a violation of a 1994 law called the One-Call Notification System Act, which led to the Digger’s Hotline of Nebraska. It provides a central resource for notification of the exact location of future excavations so the office can determine whether any utility, communication or other lines might be cut or damaged, thus disrupting service and possibly causing safety concerns.

It’s been my experience that most of these types of buried lines can be found running parallel to roads and leading to homes. I can remember as a kid, the phone company digging a trench along our rural road and through our farm property’s lawn. Certainly, utility lines aren’t found running through the middle of farm fields, are they?

While you can certainly understand utility companies not wanting to see these lines severed, it seems like a dash of good ol’ fashioned common sense is required. To try to correct this issue, the Nebraska legislature is looking to take action on a bill Feb. 7 that would make soil sampling for nutrient and water management exempt from the ‘94 law, as well as several other cases.

On another note… While we’re talking about Nebraska, it appears that if you want to receive EQIP funding for no-till practices, it’s going to need to be strictly no-till that you practice. Frank Lessiter wrote about the strict qualifications that the state holds in his column on page 6 of the February issue of No-Till Farmer’s Conservation Tillage Guide.

We were tipped off by a reader who purchased a strip-till toolbar for his corn-corn-bean rotation that to meet EQIP standards in Nebraska and receive funding, surface disturbance from the planting operation and fertilizer placement must be less than 4 inches per row and cannot exceed 25% of the row width. This grower no-tills 15-inch soybeans and strip-tills 30-inch corn.

I have mixed feelings about this. Giving the state of Nebraska the benefit of the doubt, the amount of EQIP funding they have available may only allow them to provide funding for no-till. However, if this decision has been made because of a bias against strip-till, I don’t think this is serving Nebraska’s growers very well.

While I’d like to see every grower move to no-till, I also want to see growers move to a system closer to no-till. For that reason, I’d hate to discourage a grower using full-width tillage from moving to a system that reduces tillage to 33% of the field (10-inch-wide strips in a 30-inch-row system), particularly when you consider the high level of residue that remains on the soil surface.

Strip-till can certainly be a great transitional tool for growers looking to move toward a no-till system. And for those growers struggling with no-tilling into corn residue, it provides a helpful alternative. I would caution that it’s a practice best utilized on flat or level fields, as erosion can certainly occur in strips built on slopes. Though it’s not “pure no-till,” strip-till certainly has a valuable place in agriculture.

Tim White, editor of Ohio Farmer, recently wrote about an odd occurrence that Ohio no-tiller David Brandt came across in his work with radishes as a cover crop. White, who attended last week’s National No-Tillage Conference, in Cincinnati, Ohio, noted that there was quite a stir in Bloom and Greenfield townships just outside Columbus, Ohio, in late December.

It seems the local fire department was called out several times due to reports from residents of a possible gas leak. You see, there was quite the odor of sulfur in the air over the course of several days that led residents to believe there may be a propane or natural gas leak in the neighborhood.

They never found the leak, but one of the firefighters recalled that there was a field of radishes planted near the reported leak and knew from what he had read on the Internet that they can emit quite a stink when rotting. It just so happens there was a bit of a warm-up during this time and indeed, the radishes were beginning to rot.

This is not unusual. Robert and Nick Miller of Stone Bank, Wis., whom we featured in the Fall issue of No-Till Farmer’s Conservation Tillage Guide, says the same thing happened in their area, which sits right on the edge of urban sprawl outside Milwaukee, Wis.

So, what’s a farmer to do about this? Perhaps, if you are going to raise radishes as a cover crop in an area of urban sprawl, in particular, you might want to consider taking a pre-emptive strike. Do you think it’s feasible to:

1. Provide a map of the local area, noting fields where tillage radish are growing? By informing the fire department of what you are doing, it may help them in their investigation of any reports of gas leaks that called in.
2. Draft a letter about what you are doing with radishes as a cover crop and give them to residents of neighboring fields? My thought is to not only warn them about the odor that will occur once those radishes begin rotting, but to explain to them the purpose of growing cover crops. Make them aware of the conservation benefits of that cover crop, how you are looking to reduce the amount of applied fertilizer and how these cover crops protect the soil against winter and early spring erosion.

As you know, an uninformed public often will make a big deal about something that farmers are doing, even if it is a good practice environmentally. And when they get riled up, it can lead to contentious debate and even a movement to abolish a beneficial practice used by farmers — just because they don’t understand what you are doing.

Maybe by being proactive, you’ll earn the respect of your neighbors and they won’t make a big stink about your stink.