On this episode of Conservation Ag Update, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, Michael Thompson, No-Till Farmer’s 2025 Conservation Ag Operator Fellow, shares how he’s alleviating compaction with an AerWay unit in Almena, Kan. Plus, no-tillers exchange ideas and strategies for fighting slugs in soybean fields.

In the Cover Crop Connection, Elizabethown, Pa., no-tiller Jim Hershey conducts an experiment with cover crops and vegetables.

Later in the episode, Jeremy Peters, CEO of the National Association of Conservation Districts, explains why it’s never too late to give conservation practices a try.

And in the Video of the Week, Lucas Horsch, CEO of Horsch North America, fills us in on brand-new equipment that was unveiled at the grand opening of the company’s AgTec building in Cottage Grove, Minn. 

This episode of Conservation Ag Update is brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment.

Since 1930, Yetter Farm Equipment has been providing farmers with profitable solutions. From residue management and fertilizer placement to seedbed preparation, our equipment is designed to maximize your inputs, save you time, and deliver a strong return on investment. Explore our full line of planter attachments, precision fertilizer placement options, strip-till units, and stalk rollers at yetterco.com. Let Yetter help you prepare your equipment lineup for success today.


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Longtime No-Tiller Uses Vertical Tillage to Fix Compaction 

Welcome to Conservation Ag Update! We begin this week in northern Kansas with 2025 Conservation Ag Operator Fellow Michael Thompson. He’s been dealing with some compaction issues in his end rows and turn rows where there’s heavy grain cart and tank traffic. Michael found a solution in the form of an AerWay vertical tillage machine. Let’s see how it works.

“We’ve been long-term no-till since 2000. We’re starting to see a drag in those crops, that they’re not doing as well. I think they don’t have enough air in there. There’s not enough water getting into those places and enough biology happening. We just replaced all the blades on this AerWay. Going to put some saddle tanks on there and dribble some compost extract behind it when we’re running in high traffic areas to try to relieve some of the compaction zones in the field. This will just bring some air into the mix right away. Just sort of a temporary fix. We’ll get back to cereal rye hopefully more on those high traffic areas. This is something I’m trying just to see if we can alleviate some of those compaction zones without full-fledged tillage.”

Read more about Thompson’s journey through the 2025 growing season on No-TillFarmer.com.

7 Ways to Fight Slugs in No-Till Fields

A north central Ohio no-tiller is having a terrible time with slugs in his cereal rye-soybean fields this growing season. He asked for some help in the No-Till Farmer Email Discussion Group. Let’s see what people said.

Doug Honeck, Marshall County, Iowa 

Do you have copper in your soil? I read that slugs are sensitive to copper. I tested my soil — in 10-acre grids — to determine if any copper was available. The test showed a 0 value for copper. I applied a product called Orbix that contains many micronutrients. 

H. Grant Troop, Oxford, Penn. 

1. Don’t use broadcast insecticide and be careful with seed-applied neonic insecticides. Both are effective at eliminating slug predators

2. Spread or band fertilizer (salt) over the soybean row at planting. Muriate of potash (0-0-60) alone or combined with ammonium sulfate (21-0-0-24S) works well. Slugs and salt don’t get along well. 

3. Apply seed treatments such as NutriPak Prima or Adrenaline and hopperbox seed treatment such as GroPak A.I. to speed emergence and early growth to help outgrow the slug.  

4. When able, clean the row of crop residue and cover crop to eliminate day housing for the slug population. Slugs take cover on sunny days. Make sure they need to go to the row middles for protection from direct sunlight. 

5. Make sure the planter is doing a positive row closure by interlocking the seed furrow sidewalls, so they don’t open after a couple wetting and drying cycles. An open seed furrow is a superhighway for slugs and other soybean pests. 

6. As far as copper and other micronutrients go, the main concern is having the right amount in the soil for optimum soybean growth and high yield. Too much copper is not where you want to end up. 

And Grant says if all else fails, there are slug pesticides as a rescue treatments. 

Jim Hershey’s Cover Crop Garden Experiment for Weed Suppression

Mackane Vogel here with this week’s cover crop connection. Earlier this month I visited Jim Hershey’s farm in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. And while last episode you had a chance to see what his plans are for the upcoming Pennsylvania No-Till alliance Field Day, this week I thought I’d showcase one of Jim’s latest experiments. Check out what he’s doing to prove that cover crops can work in a garden environment to suppress weeds and help grow healthier vegetables. 

“So we will demonstrate how you can actually raise vegetables in your garden with the use of cover crops. Now typically, you wouldn't plant these cover crops in the spring, you would plant something in the fall. So it’s somewhat — but this is what I think is cool. This here was undisturbed soil, no cover crop seed planted, and look at all the weeds coming up. So you already got an issue going on here that would give you a challenge. That’s why people struggle with gardens. How do I take care of the weeds? Well, that over there would help. Now, that’s not — I mean to get the whole story there — you likely are going to have to either keep the cover crops trimmed down or lay newspaper down. But it’s still better than pulling weeds. So, that’s one project we got involved in because someone at one of our events — it might’ve even been at the state farm show — when they saw the rainfall simulator and they saw the cover crops, they said ‘well could I do something like that in my garden?’ and we said, ‘yeah you can!”

 Hershey says the cover crop mix he used includes oats, buckwheat and crimson clover and he intends to plant tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage and peppers for the experiment. Well stay tuned next month for an upcoming Cover Crop Podcast series detailing all the farms I visited in Maryland and Pennsylvania this summer.

NACD CEO: ‘It’s Never too Late to Start Conservation Journey’

The NRCS is celebrating its 90th anniversary. We caught up with Jeremy Peters, CEO of the National Association of Conservation Districts. And after all these years, Jeremy tells us there’s still one big message they like to hammer home.  

“It's never too late to do the right thing. It's never too late to start that journey. We've got a lot of early adopters within our organization that have been experimenting with no-till and cover crops way before they were well known as they are today. These were people that were taking risks. They were trying something different, either because they wanted to try something different or because they had to because their economics were failing them and they needed to try something different. So I would say that it's never too late to try the right thing and to experiment with new practices.”

“Take a portion of a field and try cover crops and see how it works or many conservation districts offer no-till drills for rent. You don't have to invest in the equipment necessarily and have that big capital expense, but you can rent a no-till drill from a local conservation district and give it a try for a season and see how no-till works on your operation.”

Video of the Week: Horsch Showcases New Equipment

From Washington D.C. to Cottage Grove, Minn., now, where farmers and dealers gathered for the grand opening of the Horsch AgTec building. They had a front row seat to some big equipment reveals, including a 90-foot planter and the largest air seeder cart on the market. Lucas Horsch, CEO of Horsch North America, says it’s all about being more productive and overcoming the labor challenges that so many deal with today.  

“In the ag industry, we are lacking more and more people. Not because we don’t have people, but we don’t have the right people sometimes in the location where we are. The theme we talked about today is productivity. Now we are moving into the 90-foot planter market and the big air seeder market with up to 900-bushel tanks. On the other side, we’re driving our sprayer business forward. When it comes to weed resistance, we need to work more on our quality of application. There are two pieces to it. One is to slow down our operation sometimes, maybe go to a wider boom, and to raise our volume to have better coverage. I’m not disagreeing that you can go with lower volumes when the conditions are right, but with the climate today, we don’t always have the perfect conditions. Sometimes you have a windy day, or it’s too dry that the fine droplets are  drying up too quickly.” 

Horsch continues to expand its presence in North America. The company’s goal is to double its U.S. dealer footprint within 3 years.  

That’ll do it for this week. Got something you’d like to feature on the program? Shoot me an email at Nnewman@Lessiter Media.com. Thanks for tuning into Conversation Ag Update. Until next time, for more stories visit no-tillfarmer.com, striptillfarmer.com and covercropstrategies.com.