If you want to know just how important precision is to strip-till, Steve Cubbage has a pretty good answer. The ability, in recent years, to use technology to repeat passes in the same location time after time is what has made strip-till a viable production system, the Nevada, Mo., strip-tiller says.

“Strip-till really comes down to whether you can repeat that pass a week from now or a year from now,” Cubbage says. “What we are concerned about and looking for is being able to put nutrients down in the fall or early spring and come back exactly in that same pass when we plant our corn.

“Strip-till was literally waiting for a bride to come walking through that door, and precision guidance is the perfect marriage partner for strip-till. There’s no more guesswork.”

The owner of Record Harvest, a precision ag consulting business, Cubbage has been working with precision ag products since the mid-1990s. But he didn’t really start utilizing strip-till in his operation until 5 years ago.

“The reason it took us so long to adopt strip-till is that we never could figure out why people would strip-till without being able to come back and hit that mark,” he says. “It seemed so hard to hit that mark after you put in those strips in the fall and then tried to drive the line on your own with the planter in the spring.

“This is why RTK and GPS has really been important. It has answered that question…