Double barreled intros to get us going on this action-packed episode! We’ll check back in with Mackane here in a minute but first let’s take you inside the 60th annual National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville, Ky.
And you never know what you’ll see or who you’ll meet at the Kentucky Expo Center. We’ve all heard of the No-Till Farmer, but what about the Gold Star Farmer! He drew a big crowd at the Fendt booth.
We got our first look at some new equipment, too. Like Landoll’s VertiSTRIP strip-till machine. It’s new under the Landoll brand, but farmers have already been using it the past several years. Landoll acquired the license to it from Hawkins and AGROdeviate. We’re told if you bought the unit from Hawkins, you’ll still be able to go through them to get the parts, but any new customers going into strip-till will have to do business with Landoll.
We also got an up-close look at Precision Planting’s ArrowTube seed-orienting delivery system, which could be available on a limited basis later this year.
The equipment’s great, but it’s also pretty cool being in the same building as some of the brightest minds in agriculture. We ran into No-Till Innovator Phil Needham, who filled us in on an interesting conversation he had with a grower about residue management.
“He said his residue management in the back spread 30 feet on average. So, he has a 40-foot head on the front spreading residue about 30 feet out of the back, and my guess is it wasn’t uniform across the width. Generally, that’s a problem.
“For any piece of seeding equipment, whether it’s a John Deere single disc opener like this or a planter of any brand, you absolutely have to start by spreading residue evenly across the header width. Nobody wants to hear this, but some of these manufacturers are putting headers on the front wider than the residue management solutions in the back can spread residue. That’s a problem. Now, the manufacturers over the past 10-20 years have made significant improvements to the residue management systems in the back, but the headers have gotten wider than the choppers and spreaders that can spread residue over.
“My conclusion to the grower yesterday was to find a chopper/spreader combination that spreads the width of the header, which means maybe not going with as wide of a head. People don’t want to hear that, but it’s really important to get uniform residue spread if you want uniform emergence and development of crops like cereal and soybeans.”
Watch the full Video of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.
