Congratulations to Tuscola County, Mich., farmer Tom Hess who recently celebrated his 40-year no-till anniversary.
Hess started no-tilling in 1984 to solve his erosion problems and never looked back. His big focus now is feeding the livestock in the ground because that soil life does all his tillage, he says. I paid a visit to Tom’s farm in early May for a look at one of his long-term no-till fields.
“I’m standing in one of our CRP fields. This has been in CRP now for probably 30 years. The reason is a little more obvious if you’re standing here. We’re looking down off a hill that’s 50 feet of fall probably. We’ve intereseded with a Hiniker interseeder, twin rows in between the corn. That was put in V3-V4-V5, somewhere in there. Things move quickly that time of year. Our goal was to get the interseeded cover crop established, germinated and allow the corn to overrun it and overshade it. The cover crop goes dormant, and we were hoping it would look more like this at harvest. Over the winter, it stayed relatively green, we had a mild winter. We’re hoping we feed that biology all winter long, keeping our solar panel out, capturing some sunlight and CO2, putting in the ground and potentially building our organic matter up.”
Hess also flies on a good chunk of his cover crops — about 50 pounds of cereal rye, barley and ryegrass per acre — in early September.
Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.