Let’s check out our Video of the Week, from our interview with Parker, S.D., farmer Desmond Miller at the No-Till Conference. Desmond talks about his modified ridge-till system, one that he says is perfectly compatible with no-till.
“The first thing I did was I bought a Buffalo planter and cut it up into a million pieces, and rebuilt it, first of all, by lengthening the distance between the ridge cleaner and the planter so that all of this material, copious amounts of residue, can pass through without plugging up. I think that’s one of the big frustrations early ridge-tillers had was it just plugged up and couldn’t handle the residue.
“The other thing I did was I just totally threw away that little bulldozer shovel in front of the Buffalo planter and put on my own big 24-inch concave coulter, single coulter in front of the machine. It acts as a row cleaner, gets rid of all the residue and about one inch, no more than one inch of soil, so it just carefully scrapes off the top. Those two features made the mechanization of ridge-till work for me very well.”
Miller does very little tillage — just once every three years he tosses soil and residue from the valleys to the ridge tops.
Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.