Jeremy Swanson shares a few final pointers for farmers considering a switch from conventional tillage to conservation tillage.
More from this seriesJeremy is a father of two, farmer, and agronomy consultant from central Iowa.
In a conservation tillage system, you’re not making the soil black every year (at least not a majority of a field in the case of strip tillage). That would be a big change for many farmers, yet some of us have successfully navigated the transition. In this final article in Jeremy Swanson’s series on the transition from conventional to conservation tillage, we learn about his approach to nutrient management, testing tillage practices on your farm, and a few other considerations for any farmer who is considering making the switch to conservation tillage.
One of the concerns with conservation tillage is that you run the risk of stratification in your soil. Do I have this going on in my fields? There’s a chance of that, but this is one reason why I still like using strip tillage for corn. At least every couple of years I am doing something to mix up the top eight inches of my soil. So I don’t think I have the stratification occurring that you can experience in a one-hundred-percent no-till system. With this in mind, I still broadcast all of my dry fertilizer over the top of my fields.
There are some guys who put the fertilizer right into their strips. That provides some advantages in terms of using less product overall and having the nutrients focused close to the roots. But with our salt-based fertilizers, you’re also then putting a zone of salt close to the plants, which the roots will have to work through. And roots don’t like salt. I think that’s one of the reasons that some people are seeing inconsistent results with strip tilling. I’m not sold on running fertilizers right into the strips from an agronomic perspective.
I think the ability to run some liquid in-furrow products on the farm is an advantage in strip till. In my testing, I haven’t seen the benefits yet on my farms. However, since I started doing this, we’ve been in two years of drought. When we get into a different weather pattern, we’ll have to see if this provides some benefit. I think to be able to get some biology and maybe some phosphorus into the early, cool spring soil; there should be some benefit there.
Up in Minnesota, most guys have in-furrow systems on their planters. They’re colder up there. We warm up here in northern Iowa in the spring, so that’s maybe slowed adoption of in-furrow application for strip tillers around here.
You can achieve the same yields with strip till and no till as you do with conventional tillage. That’s one hundred percent doable. Are there certain weather years where wet conditions will bite you a little bit in a no-till system? Yes, but having good tile underneath can help prevent that. Otherwise, if you’re hit with a wet spring in no till, that can definitely be a challenge with getting things to dry out. However, at the same time, as you transition to no-till your soil structure will change and continue to improve.
This spring, one of my best friends—the guy who farms right across the fence from me—had a heck of a time getting his beans in the ground. In fact, I had all of my beans planted before his. He’s all conventional tillage and, as you know, my bean acres are no-till. So, once your soil structure changes back to its more natural state, I think the threat of a wet spring swamping your planting plans and your yields down the road is reduced quite a bit.
That brings me back to something I mentioned earlier: It’s important to give things a fair shake on your farm. Let’s say you decide to switch to no till and you get hit with a wet spring that first year. If you’re looking for excuses not to do things, that wet spring is probably going to make you say, “nope, no till’s not for me; I’m out.”
If you talk to the guys who have given conservation tillage a fair shake, most of them have done testing on their farms—multiple years of comparing conventional tillage versus no-till or strip-till methods. And a lot of us have come to the same conclusion: once you run both systems side-by-side for multiple years, you realize that you just can’t justify running the tillage equipment.
What is fair when it comes to trialing conservation tillage on your farm? That’s a hard one to answer, because it depends a lot on your soil. Where I’m at, in the Des Moines Lobe, we have heavy clay-based soils with very high organic matter. With this in mind, you probably have to give conservation tillage a good three to five year trial around here. If you’ve got tile under your ground, you can probably start to see benefits in three years. If your ground isn’t tiled, maybe it’s four or five years. On my farm, the payoff started to hit in year three and we didn’t have great tile under the ground at the time.
At the end of the day, I think three years would give you a fairly decent trial, all things considered. This gives you a decent probability of encountering all the weather variables of farming.
When it comes to testing strip-till and no-till methods on a farm, you also have to remember to look beyond your yields. I get it—everything is based on yields in farming. It’s the big question: “how were your yields this year?” When you think about it, yield is the easiest number to come up. It’s a little more difficult to take your time, fuel, and all that into consideration. But you should.
As a farmer, I don’t come right out and say that I’m worth thirty bucks an hour or whatever amount I want to choose. Hired help, on the other hand, is easier to quantify. I really think you do need to take your own time into account. It’s easy to dismiss the whole idea because we all know that farming is a lifestyle, not a job. So we tend not to think about the value of our time. But once you start to take away all those tillage passes and add up the time savings, it can be eye-opening in terms of what other possibilities this opens up.
And then there’s fuel, which to me is an important number, especially given the high price of diesel. If you say initially that you’ll save ten percent on fuel, that might not come out to be a big number. At least it isn’t a number that would compete with a yield loss. But over time, fuel is going to add up big, because the savings keep rolling in year after year. And we’re talking about getting rid of some of your most thirsty field operations—the hard pulling associated with conventional tillage.
The other point I like to cover when illustrating savings potential with limited tillage is residue management. Obviously, we need to manage our residue, and the common answer to this problem is lots of tillage. But, as an alternative, let’s say you run your sprayer over your fields with a biological and soil penetrant to help break that residue down and condition your soil. There’s obviously a cost there; probably fifteen to twenty dollars an acre just for the products themselves. And then you have to factor in your time, fuel, sprayer depreciation, and so on.
So, someone might say, well, Jeremy, I can run my vertical-till machine for twenty-five bucks an acre or even less. But let’s think about that. You might be pulling that machine at a maximum of ten miles an hour or more likely closer to seven. Even with a huge tool, you’re still not as wide as a sprayer—ninety or even one hundred and twenty feet wide. And the sprayer is going to be traveling at twelve, fifteen, maybe even twenty miles an hour. Now, how much faster and more efficiently can you get across your ground and manage that residue with a big sprayer versus your big tillage tool? In reality, you can manage your residue a lot faster with a sprayer than with any tillage tool on the market with the right products.
This is why I’m excited about what we’re doing here with the FCLG. Making a switch from a widely accepted practice such as conventional tillage to strip till or no till can be fairly daunting. You have to confront the fact that you might lose some yield initially as your soil transitions, and then there’s the prospect of having to learn a new system and all the kinks you have to iron out. That’s where networking with other farmers comes into play. Ask around among guys who have already been through the transition to get an idea of what you can expect. Networking can shorten the learning curve.
As I’ve said throughout this series, eliminating all those tillage passes and everything that goes along with them has been a blessing for my operation. Conservation tillage has allowed me to keep up with both the farm and my agronomy business. And it’s been fun to watch my soil transition back to its more natural state with better water infiltration and a healthier environment to support my crops.
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