Brought to you by:

     
   

   

     
   

The Conservation Ag Update is brought to you by Martin-Till.

More from this series

Since 1991, Martin Industries has designed, manufactured and sold leading agriculture equipment across North America and the world. Known for Martin-Till planter attachments, the company has expanded to include a five-step planting system including our floating, air or hydraulic and frame mounted row cleaners along with closing wheel systems, twisted drag chains, fertilizer openers, weight transfer systems and more in their lineup. Their durable and reliable planter attachments are making it possible for more and more farmers to plant into higher levels of residue & cover crops.

   Full Transcript

I'm John Duberstein, senior editor at No-Till Farmer, and I'm here at Commodity Classic in San Antonio, Texas. And I'm at the booth of the National Association of Conservation Districts. Welcome to the latest edition of Conservation Ag Update.

Conservation Ag Update is brought to you by Martin-Till.

All right. Thank you very much for that introduction, John. Great to see everyone here for another episode of Conservation Ag Update. We'll begin right there in San Antonio where John had a front row seat to a press conference announcing sweeping changes to the USDA's much maligned computer network. So USDA leaders say new upgrades will make it easier for farmers to apply for grants and disaster funding, update acreage, and participate in other farm related programs.

It's long, long, long overdue. And we do, secretary made a point, Doge, some of the architects are actually folks that looked at these antiquated legacy systems and said, "Oh my gosh, these things are going to break." And really designed kind of the pathway forward. And so super happy to be a part of it. I am not a computer engineer or programmer by any means, but I do know when I see something that looks like it's going to work, I can say yeah, let's do that.

I hope you all heard the staggering numbers, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money have gone into an antiquated and broken system, that included over 1,000 contractors across hundreds of different platforms. I have no idea how these farmers have been dealing with this all these years.

And the administration is also streamlining conservation programs to make it easier to bundle and apply for different practices. For a full breakdown of what the network upgrades will entail head to no-tillfarmer.com.

All right. Elsewhere at Commodity Classic, a few companies debuted brand new strip-till equipment. We got our first look at the ETS liquid and dry fertilizer system, as well as the Case IH Nutri-Tiller 1000. Let's check out some of the key features.

This provides growers a larger tank for their liquid systems. This is a 1250 gallon liquid tank. And the dry bin behind it is a five ton fertilizer bin, so it allows them to run dry and liquid together. Where the fertilizer is applied on the row units themselves, it's a dual drop tube. So you're applying your liquid and dry fertilizer right in the strip as you traditionally would with any of our equipment, whether dry or liquid, this just brings it all together. Again, giving growers a lot more versatility for their fertility programs. It is still all run through our SoilWarrior SWICM technology. It's a Raven RCM. It's an ISO connection into your tractor.

And then the final step of the system, the berm builders, berm conditioner to provide that, what we want the width of that strip to be, that berm height to provide that nice strip out the back of the machine. That brings me ahead to the shank. So this unit here is a shank machine. We offer that to ... you can run six to nine inches deep. We also offer fertilizer options for this shank as well too, to run liquid, dry and hydrous or liquid and dry together. We also offer it without any fertilizer attachments.

Looking forward to learning more about both of those at the National Strip-Tillage Conference, August 6th through 7th in Springfield, Illinois.

All right, right now, let's head out to the office of Mackane Vogel for today's Cover Crop Connection. Mackane, take it away.

All right. I'm here today with Etienne Sutton, she is one of our presenters this year at the National Cover Crop Summit. Etienne, why don't you just tell us a little bit about your presentation and give everybody kind of a preview about what they might learn?

Sure. So I'll be sharing some of the work that we've been doing as part of our cover crop variety improvement and seed production program. It's based out of the University of Missouri Center for Regenerative Agriculture. But includes collaborators all across the country, ranging from university extension and researchers to the seed industry, as well as a really exciting on-farm component where we're working actively with farmers to test different species and varieties in their fields.

Yeah. And I guess what's kind of been, I don't know, one of the biggest surprises or one of the biggest takeaways for you kind of going through the data over the last little bit here?

Yeah. So what we've been learning so far from the data is that there are some really strong regional adaptation trends. So when you're thinking about what cover crop species to plant, there are all of these different varieties within a given species. Some of those varieties may be better suited to, for example, the Southeastern US, some are better suited to the Midwest. So those are some of the things I'll be covering in my presentation. And hopefully will be useful to folks making cover crop decisions.

Absolutely, yeah. Well, I don't want to give too much away, but it's a great presentation. So hopefully, guys, you're all signed up already. If you're not, be sure to sign up for the fully free, fully online National Cover Crop Summit this year.

Can't wait for the summit. Thank you very much, Mackane.

Well, a couple years ago, Jason Webster, who manages the PTI Research Farm in Pontiac, Illinois, was talking to a high yielding corn grower and he asked him, "Hey, what's your secret sauce?" Well, the corn grower said, "That's easy. It's the chicken litter we've been applying the past 65 years." Jason immediately knew he had to test it out at the research farm. And here's what he found out about chicken litter.

This fall putting on, I think this is two and a half ton of dry litter, going across the cornstalks here. It was super dry this fall. We get it shipped in. Never got a rain on it. It spread pretty good. Nutritionally, that's a pretty good product, but I also look at it and say, I think there's some biology in this thing as well. So I almost consider this maybe a soil health product.

And so if you guys have heard me talk before, my soil health testing at the PTI Farm has involved cover crops. Another 10 year study. And I've been waiting to see the profitability of the cover crop. So I said, you know what? Let's bring chicken litter in and let's add it to this soil health study and just see how long it takes for these guys to pay for themself.

And this is soybeans after corn, two ton of chicken litter first year right out of the gate has given me the highest yields and the highest profitability. Again, year number one, right out of the gate. So I kind of like that.

This is corn after corn. Look at this, we're just tickling 300 bushel corn, two ton of chicken litter, highest yield, not a whole lot of profit there, but much higher than some of the other ones that have been in this for multiple years.

And finally, here's corn after soybeans. Really nice yield gain and some profit, again, year number one, right out of the gate.

That was from Jason Webster's PTX Winter Conference presentation a few weeks ago.

All right, now to the video of the week, Bill Lehmkuhl's been no-tilling for a long time in Mincer, Ohio, and he also runs Precision Agri Services, Precision Farming Dealer's 2026 most valuable dealership. So during my recent visit with Bill, I pressed record as he reflected on how it all started with technology on his farm.

So some of the old field computers we used for sampling and that, we used the old Lynx computer here. I even did soil sampling off an old iPAQ, some of the Ag Leader handhelds as well. So with that being said, we also did topographic survey work, that's with some of the Trimble displays there. But when I started in 1994, we were doing soil sampling off of a little iPAQ computer for that, and looking at maps and sample points out there. And it's evolved from there. Of course, now we can use iPads and the different apps and software that are out there to do soil sampling. And bring that data back to the office and then go through it, match it to samples, do the mapping, and then get that back out to our customers.

Seeing this stuff, does it bring back any memories from the good old days?

Oh yeah, it does. I mean, when I first started, I had a six by six set up with a field computer on it. We still probe everything by hand, we do not machine probe at all. We want to make sure that everything going into that bucket is of the same consistency from that zone as far as soil type and how it looks. So we do a lot of zone sampling. So we make sure that those zones match what's going on out there in the field. And of course, we bring the various layers into that, yield maps, topography, whether that's soil conductivity data by Veris or anything else. And we take a look and analyze all that data to get the best results back to our customers and see what's going on out there in the field.

Interesting stuff there. Always great to visit with the no-till innovator, Bill Lehmkuhl. That'll wrap things up. Hey, planting season's right around the corner, I'd love to see photos and videos of your setup. You can email them to me at nnewman@lessitermedia.com. That'll do it for Conservation Ag Update. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll see you next time.