On this episode of Conservation Ag Update, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, we head inside the Pennsylvania No-Till Alliance's 20th anniversary field day in Elizabethown, Pa.

Lisa Blazure of the Stroud Water Research Center and Sjoerd Duiker, Penn State no-till and cover crop researcher, dig deep into a soil pit to show the true impact and value of living roots and nightcrawlers.

In the Cover Crop Connection, David Hunsberger, regional coordinator, King’s AgriSeeds, shows how MaizePro cover crops set the table for corn.  

Later in the episode, hundreds of farmers network and learn about strip-till at the 2025 National Strip-Tillage Conference. Plus, we stop by the pre-conference Iowa State Strip-Till Field Day for some perspective on the growth of strip-till in the Corn Belt and beyond.

No-till takes center stage at the National Association of Conservation Districts summer event in Milwaukee, Wis., where Mike Lessiter shares the benefits of the practice with city and state leaders.

And finally, in our Video of the Week, Gary Zimmer, the Father of Biological Agriculture, shares some words of advice for farmers to live by every single day.

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.


TRANSCRIPT

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No-Till Soil Pit: How Deep Do Nightcrawlers Go?

Let’s kick things off right there at the Pennsylvania No-Till Alliance field day, where attendees got an up-close look at how deep Jim Hershey’s roots run after 25-plus years of cover crops and no-till. Lisa Blazure of the Stroud Water Research Center and Sjoerd Duiker, Penn State no-till and cover crop researcher, conducted a soil pit session. Let’s dig deep for some highlights.

Lisa Blazure, Soil Health Coordinator, Stroud Water Research Center: “Everything green that we see around us is photosynthesizing. Photosynthesis grabs that carbon dioxide that’s in the atmosphere, combines it with water and sunlight, and makes simple sugars. Anytime we have a living photosynthetic plant, it is producing sugars, building that root system and pumping those simple sugars and other compounds out into the soil. We call those root exudates, or the liquid carbon pathway. That carbon, through that process, is five times more likely to stay in that soil and contribute to long-term stable organic matter.”

Sjoerd Duiker, Professor of Soil Management, Penn State University: “We see a lot of nightcrawler channels in the soil. You have them everywhere. One study says our subsoils are so dense and so compact naturally, that roots cannot really penetrate them. How do those roots come down in here? They grow predominantly through the cracks and the micro-pores. All those roots are following the nightcrawler channels. Those nightcrawlers have shown to be very sensitive to tillage because they need crop residue right here at the surface.”

Lisa Blazure, Soil Health Coordinator, Stroud Water Research Center: “If you can calibrate your eye to identify those nightcrawler mittens, that is a great tool as you’re walking across your field because once you recognize that little cluster of residue, it gives you a great indication to how your nightcrawler population is doing. Those nightcrawlers can live 5-7 years, and once they die, if there’s not tillage in the system, that burrow stays in place for 25 years, and that is easy access year after year for your roots to get down in dry years to that water table, and to those micronutrients as well.”

Let’s check back in with Mackane Vogel for more field day coverage in today’s Cover Crop Connection. 

Using Cover Crops to Set the Table for Corn

Mackane Vogel here with this week’s cover crop connection. I’m here at the Pennsylvania No-Till Alliance’s 20th Anniversary celebration on Jim Hershey’s farm, having a field day in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. As you can see we’ve had lots of equipment on display, lots of demos so far and lots of great speakers too. So, we’ve got a great Cover Crop Connection in store for you and we’re going to toss it off to that segment right now.

“This is my MaizePro. It’s planted a little out of season right now. We like to plant this in the last half of August, because it likes the cooler weather. This sort of sets the table. So if you’re going to have Sunday dinner and you’re going to have friends over after church, it could very well be that you’re going to have the table set before you leave for church. Or if not, you’re leaving home really early and you’re getting it all laid out. You get the silverware, the glasses, the napkins all set out. That’s what MaizePro is trying to do for corn. Corn is your guest. MaizePro is setting the table for your guest — for a banquet. There’s 10 different species in here. About half of them will winterkill, so we plant in August. Things like Sorghum Sudan will winterkill, the flax will winterkill, some of your clovers, your vetches and your winter rye will stay. So, it’s a feeding program. I talked over there about how important it is to feed the microbes. With this here we are feeding through living roots and then we are also feeding the soil as the things expire and then we can either plant green or terminate it.”

Alright and as I mentioned before, there has been just a plethora of great cover crop content on the farm today, so stay tuned in the coming weeks for lots more from this event and be sure to go check out the podcast with Jim Hershey at Cover Crop Strategies dot com as well.

Strip-Tillers, No-Tillers Gather for NSTC & ISU Field Day

The 12th annual National Strip-Tillage Conference is in the books. And what a show it was, with hundreds of farmers, educators and manufacturers exchanging ideas in Iowa City.

Empty seats were hard to find for general session presentations from Jerry Hatfield, Joey Hanson, Jon Stevens, Ray Flickner, Gary Zimmer and Jared Fender. There were also 16 classrooms, 14 roundtables and hours of networking in the halls. 

And beforehand, several attended the pre-conference Strip-Till Field Day hosted by Iowa State Extension. They got an up-close look at 11 different toolbars and also received a strip-till crash course from Iowa State’s Levi Powell. I caught up with Powell and asked him about the state of strip-till in Iowa and surrounding states. 

“We see it growing in a lot of different hot pockets. You’ll get a couple guys start into it, neighbors see it, it’s being successful for them. They might do some custom work for some neighbors, and it grows from there. We’re getting more questions about it every year. We’ve been doing strip-till in Ames in our research programs since 2016, so we’ve been at it almost 10 years in our plots. It’s neat to see it more broadly adopted. As input costs are changing, and different environmental regulations changing, you get more people starting to look at it. I think the biggest game-changer has been the technology. We just have so much more technology to make this easier out of the box, as far as in-field guidance and field management that we didn’t have 10-12 years ago, so it just keeps getting better and better and more easier to adopt for folks.”

State, City Leaders Learn about No-Till at NACD Meeting

The National Association of Conservation Districts gathered for its Summer Meeting in Milwaukee, July 28. 

Mayor Cavalier Johnson and Governor Tony Evers were in attendance for the keynote presentation featuring No-Till Farmer’s Mike Lessiter, who spoke about the key elements of no-till history and why it’s a blueprint for future change. Lessiter shared some of the many benefits of no-till with the audience.   

“Water management, this is a real-world picture of conventional and no-till ground following the same rain event on adjacent farmland. Everyone who's running side-by-side plots can show this very story by turning on the pivots and watching what happens. We've got detailed summaries of farmland following tremendous storm events, and conventional farmers can lose five tons of acre virtually overnight. Meanwhile, a neighboring farmer with no-till and cover crops might lose just 200 pounds in the same rainfall. Very significant.”

“I imagine most of you have seen a no-till water demonstration here that clearly depicts what water looks like coming off conventionally-tilled grounds versus no-till versus no-till with cover crops. A great story on water.”

“The soils, the organic matter, the soil structure, the benefits of earthworms, no-till fields will have 10 times the earthworms as conventionally tilled soils greatly improving soil structure, moving and depositing nutrients and all the biological activity.”

Watch the full presentation on No-TillFarmer.com. 

Video of the Week: Gary Zimmer’s Words of Advice

Let’s wrap things up with our Video of the Week, and some words of advice from the great Gary Zimmer during the closing seconds of his Strip-Till Conference presentation last week. 

“And my last slide. Live like you’re going to die tomorrow. I’m 80 years old and I could die tomorrow, you never know, that’s how I’m going to live. But farm like you are going to live forever because someone else is going to take it over. That’s the fun in farming! Thank you very much, I hope I gave you some things to think about.” 

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.