No-Till Farmer Blog

It’s never too early to start inspecting your combine, corn header and bean platform. I use to do it myself, but now I have the dealer check the equipment over.

The dealer has a checklist and knows what he is looking for. I’m also capable of making the repairs myself, but the dealer can do it in less time. I use a thermo gun, and do a temperature check of bearing, chains, etc., during a 30-minute stationary run to help catch any possible future failures.

The dealer inspection can also help you decide if it’s time to repair or upgrade to a newer machine. For example, an old corn header needs $10,000 in repairs vs. trading for a brand-new header costing you $40,000 in boot money. In my opinion, from a business standpoint, you are better off to repair the old header. I know I will pay more income tax, but isn’t that a good thing?

One management challenge that is increasingly plaguing many of us as we attempt to “master” the art of direct-seeding or no-till is managing field borders. Many growers have resorted to spraying edges with Roundup. This has resulted in killing native cover grasses.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep China lettuce, cheat grass, Italian rye, bedstraw and a host of other obnoxious weeds from encroaching into the fields. If fences are still on field edges, the problem is magnified.

A leader from the Australia Zero Tillage Association participating in a Direct Seed Association tour several years ago warned us we were heading for a disaster relying too heavily on Roundup. But few seem to come up with alternatives that have long-lasting effectiveness.

Is there a library of management strategies published anywhere in the annals of no-till literature on this topic? Maybe this should be a subject of focus at the next National No-Tillage Conference. How many of you may be seeing a problem with weed control on field edges?

I was invited to Memphis last week to share my dealings with glyphosate-resistant weeds and to see the South’s problem with resistant pigweed firsthand. It was a rewarding trip.

The best thing is I met a lot of good people with strong minds who are aware of this problem. Dr. Stephen Powles from Western Australia University was one of those people. He has talked about this problem since his first battle with resistant ryegrass in Australia and New Zealand in 1983. Some farmers are still afraid to plant annual ryegrass as a cover crop for fear of introducing another resistant weed!

The main point he shared at this Bayer CropScience sponsored event made good sense to me. Get your resistant weed populations down before tackling resistant weeds with glufosinate ammonium, formerly Liberty and now Ignite herbicide. We have lost too many good chemistries already, as retired Extension weed specialist Ford Baldwin lamented, and many farmers remembered the loss of cyanazine or Bladex in corn. The loss of the wonder herbicide glyphosate was compared to losing penicillin to fight human diseases.

The big question was, how do you get resistant weed populations down? The nasty word “tillage” was brought up and many farmers shuddered. I can’t do that in southwest Ohio. My soils are too fragile and erodible, and I have spent considerable effort and money in trying to save them and build them without tearing them apart again.

So, I thought of my crop rotation, spray schedule, chemical rotation and cover crops. The first thing that popped into my mind was that I always have less weeds with cover crops, especially with radishes. I have set a goal to cover all my fields after harvest this fall and try and keep them covered.  I intend to smother out my weed population.

There are always escapes. I will carefully use the existing products to kill my weed escapes and always use a residual with glyphosate- and glufosinate-resistant crops. This is working pretty well for me, but I have to get serious about this. Farmers are going to lose their farms and their career if they don’t get a handle on this — seriously.

One farmer we visited had spent $50 on herbicides alone and the soybeans were taken over by resistant pigweeds. The pigweed family, which includes redroot here, tall waterhemp in Iowa and Palmer amaranth in the South, have male and female plants. You can kill the the male, but pollinated females that escape produce thousands of seeds. The seed bank is huge.

Do you have any idea how big your weed seedbank is? You got a glimpse of it in this crazy growing year called 2010. There isn’t a clean field in Ohio that I have seen. There are always escapes, even in the so-called clean fields. Are they resistant? They probably are and if they aren’t, it takes more broad-spectrum chemical than ever to kill them. They will soon be resistant.

We got a good view of the resistant weeds around the world by focusing on the huge Palmer amaranth problem in the Mid-South’s Delta region. Those weeds are out of control. We have to be careful not to ruin Ignite herbicide trying to save Roundup Ready crops.

What I heard and saw made me happy that I have stayed with non-GMO corn and switched back to non-GMO soybeans for a more total weed control solution. I see where wheat and a cover crop are key in my rotation.

This is going to take a farmer-wide and industry-wide effort to avoid the huge problem the South is experiencing, what I see locally and in the Midwest, and even down under in Australia and New Zealand. We have weeds and we have too many resistant weeds!

There are several items related to what we do with the no-till planter that have a significant impact on the yield expectations.

The premise is that we expect very high-yielding crops using the no-till system of crop production. After all, water is the most critical input for high yields, and no-till properly done always yields more plant-available water. We have great genetic yield potential in today’s seeds, and this potential continues to improve with progressive research. Our soils are in pretty good shape fertility-wise and we are working on improving soil health.

With a good growth medium (soil), top genetics (seed) and an ample supply of crop nutrients (fertilizer, manure and/or biosolids), an insufficient supply of water is the most limiting input for the crop. Regardless of the job we do with the soil, choosing genetics and providing nutrients, water availability will have more of an impact on yield than any other input.

Previously, I’ve looked at the positive results from using cover crops and residue management to maintain a mulch cover on the soil surface to increase crop-available soil water — and improve soil health. We then considered the impact of using starter fertilizer on our corn crop. We can force some excellent early season growth with strategically placed starter fertilizers.

With this as our background, let’s turn our attention to the no-till planter. We have one opportunity each season to plant the crop right. If we fail to get it right, the high yields we are striving for will elude us. Using the corn planter as an example and starting at the front hitch and ending with the seed furrow closing system, we can break down the components to make sure they are doing the job the way it needs to be done.

Tractors have drawbars that vary in height. Never forget this. The planter hitch is designed so it can be adjusted. This allows the planter hitch to be fitted to a wide range of drawbar heights. By properly adjusting the hitch clevis on the planter, we can have the desired planter hitch height. The correct planter hitch height assures a level planter front to back. A level planter can operate as designed. A tilting planter will always be a problematic planter. Step one: Level the planter by setting the hitch height as stipulated in the operator’s manual.

Next up is the fertilizer delivery system. Fertilizer can be placed pretty far front or back on the planter. The optimum setup will place starter fertilizer in the seed furrow and in a band beside or over the row. The seed-furrow fertilizer is usually a liquid formulation and is applied through a furrow-placed tube or seed firmer.

The most common problem is the use of oversized tubing. Quarter-inch tubing is the standard for a seed-furrow delivery system. Larger-diameter tubing will usually cause breaks in the delivery flow. The ideal is an unbroken string of liquid fertilizer in the seed-furrow area.

The second problem is not using a flow meter or other flow check device to monitor individual row flow rates and to prevent line draining when the planter is raised for turnaround. Limit nitrogen plus potassium rates according to local area recommendations (usually 10 pounds per acre of nitrogen plus potassium or less). This is the V1 to V2 growth stage feed.

The banded starter fertilizer beside the row or over the row is very important. This can be dry granular or liquid fertilizer. Use a phosphorus-based fertilizer and put it in the ground if the crop needs phosphorus. If applying a nitrogen and/or potassium fertilizer, a surface dribble application works fine unless the soil is low in potassium, in which case put the potassium in the ground.

On high-testing soils, a nitrogen-only starter works fine by supplying part of the crop’s nitrogen requirements and giving the “starter effect.” This is the V3 to V4 growth stage and beyond feed.

We will move further back on the planter next time. We’d love it if you would post comments here on the blog, or you can send them to Darrell Bruggink at dbruggink@lesspub.com and he can post them for you.