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.”

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.