Luke Koffman grew up on a small dairy farm in Eden, Wis., where conventional tillage was the standard. The third-generation farmer knew there had to be a better way.

That better way revealed itself in the summer of 2018 during the Wisconsin Farm Technology Days in Portage County. Luke and his dad, Ed, stopped by the Environmental Tillage Systems (ETS) booth and got an up-close look at a SoilWarrior for the first time. They were invited to a demo and were impressed by what they saw.  

“I had already been reading about strip-till in No-Till Farmer and Strip-Till Farmer magazines, but seeing the practice in action for the first time had a wow factor to it,” Koffman says. “It was a transformative experience when we saw strip-tilled corn at the demo. After that, there was no going back.”

The Koffmans rented a SoilWarrior the following fall and put strip-till to the test with a side-by-side trial. One field was chisel plowed in the fall and cultivated in the spring. The other field was strip-tilled. 

“The funny thing about that first year is the strip-tilled corn looked shorter,” Koffman says. “I called Dave Sender from ETS and said, ‘What did you get me into? This corn is a foot-and-a-half shorter.’ He kept telling me to just wait, height doesn’t mean anything. The strip-tilled corn, which was chopped for silage, ended up being 1-2 tons per acre better than the conventional corn. There was no going back after seeing that.” 

‘Really Solid