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Cover Crops Transform Challenging Acres to Efficient Yield Leaders
No-tilling and cover cropping help Mark Turner reduce fertility needs and take fields considered too poor to grow corn to 200-bushel yields.
Pictured Above: (L to R) Mark and June Turner with daughter Hannah, and Leslie and Mathew Turner with son Jack
Check The Specs...
NAME: Mark Turner
FARM: Turner Farms
LOCATION: Livermore, Ky.
YEARS NO-TILLING: 33
ACRES: 450
CROPS: Corn, soybeans and tobacco
Check The Specs...
NAME: Mark Turner
FARM: Turner Farms
LOCATION: Livermore, Ky.
YEARS NO-TILLING: 33
ACRES: 450
CROPS: Corn, soybeans and tobacco
Pastures used to help hold the soil in place on the rolling hills that dominate our Kentucky farm. My dad raised cattle, so he would rotate fields between corn and hay. When he eventually retired, he liquidated the herd and shifted to row crops.
It made a lot of sense for us to look at no-till. Without pasture in the rotation we didn’t have much to maintain soil structure and we started fighting gully erosion. We needed to keep roots in the soil, especially on the steeper fields. No-till was doubly appealing because our farm is relatively small, so we don’t want to have to maintain a lot of equipment.
Initially we no-tilled double-cropped wheat and soybeans, and eventually started no-tilling corn, too. Yields were acceptable and we were spending less time and money farming so we committed to the practice.
Our first piece of no-till equipment was a John Deere 7000 planter set up simply with a no-till coulter and spiked closing wheels. Now we run a John Deere 7200 planter and a John Deere 750 is used to seed soybeans and cover crops.
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