Throughout this series, Iowa farmer Jeremy Swanson has shared with us the story of his farm’s transition to conservation tillage. He’s also given us an inside look at his equipment and some of the common issues strip till farmers face, from residue management to strip quality. In this article, Jeremy digs deeper into the reasons why conservation tillage pays for his farm and highlights a few other important considerations for farmers looking to implement it in their operations. 

The Benefits of Fewer Passes 

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but in the area where I farm (north central Iowa), there are several of us doing strip till and no till. Why so many guys in our one area? I think there’s always a little bit of watching each other, talking about our operations, and trying each other’s ideas to gain an advantage. It really helped that there was a Blu-Jet equipment dealer in Fort Dodge that had the strip-till bars. The guy who owned the company at the time was also farming. He was one of the first guys in our area to do strip till and it just sort of took off from there. However, I wouldn’t say that everyone for miles around is involved in conservation tillage. Conventional is still king. 

For me, as a family farmer, strip till was really appealing to me. Plus, I have another job—I’m an agronomist. So the ability to eliminate passes meant that I could get my farming done and maintain an off-the-farm job to boot. For me, I think this is the biggest advantage of conservation tillage. But now, there are also a couple larger farmers in the area doing it. I think for them, it allowed them to be able to farm more acres and not have as much help or equipment around. So you’re talking less fuel, less time, and fewer labor costs. 

The Need for Skilled Operators

There is an important difference between strip till and conventional tillage, though. I won’t call it a downside, but for some operations it very well could be. Basically, when you’re into strip till, you have to know what you’re doing. If you’re not doing the strips yourself, you need pretty close oversight to make sure the strips are where and how you want them. You can’t really just throw a high school kid in the cab and tell them to go to work. In conventional tillage, this is a lot easier to do—here kid, go make the soil black with the ripper. With strip till, you have to have good guidance lines and know how to load and follow them. You have to know how to fine-tune the bar and the monitor to get the rig to go where it needs to go. And you have to make sure the depth is correct across the bar. 

Once you get everything set correctly, you can manage it from the cab. With my bar, it’s fairly common to break a shear bolt on the shanks. So I still have to pay close attention to what’s happening—you’ll see it in the quality of the strip. Still, when starting out there’s definitely a learning curve and, if you depend on other labor to work your fields, you’ll probably need to do some additional oversight to make sure everything’s working correctly.

The reality for some operations is that they just don’t want to manage all this. Or they can’t. So there’s been some people who try strip till and eventually transition back to conventional tillage. It just goes to show how every farm is unique and that there’s no approach that works for everyone. 

Matching Equipment for a Smooth Operation

With my Blu-Jet bar, which is a twelve-row bar, I’m able to pull it between six and seven miles per hour (depending on the year) with my 275-horse tractor. Most guys have at least a 250- or 275-horse front wheel assist around the farm now, so the twelve-row bar is a nice sized bar to pull. In my area, I’ve seen a couple sixteen-row bars around and one neighbor has a twenty-four-row bar. He has a twenty-four-row planter and wanted the two to match up. I wouldn’t say you're required to match the size of your strip till bar to your planter. In fact, it takes a whole lot of tractor to pull those big strip-till bars. 

However, if your planter and strip-till bar aren’t matched row-wise, you do have to be extra diligent about your GPS lines; you have to be sure that you’re exactly thirty inches between each pass or whatever row width you’re using. Could you run a combo such as a twelve-row strip-till bar and a sixteen-row planter? Yes, it’s doable, but probably not advisable. 

Think About More than Bushels

When considering whether or not to implement strip till on a farm, it pays to think about more than just bushels. First, I’ve already mentioned the time and labor savings. That was the biggest benefit for me. But you also have to consider the fuel savings. We’ve eliminated multiple passes across our fields. And this benefit compounds year after year. 

If you get outside my area, one of the other big advantages of strip till is the ability to put your fertilizer right in the strip. I don’t do this, but I would imagine that you can use less fertilizer because you’re concentrating it right underneath the row. To do this, though, your equipment costs will go up; you would need an air cart paired with your bar or a Soil Warrior type machine, and you would also need a tender truck. Fertilizer is corrosive, so you’re going to have more maintenance required on any machine that it touches. Those are some of the reasons that guys in my area haven’t made the switch to this method and continue to apply fertilizer with other methods.

Weed Control with Conservation Tillage

Weed control is different without conventional tillage. For one, you have to use herbicides to kill early-season weeds that you’d usually knock out with the field cultivator. With conventional tillage, you’re usually after a weed control product that has residual value that will prevent additional weeds from germinating. In our strip-till and no-till program I still want a herbicide with that residual value, but I also have to incorporate something that will also torch the weeds that have already emerged. 

Every year I plan for the worst when it comes to weed control in terms of every weed coming that you can possibly imagine. So I keep a shed full of chemicals just in case. If I hit a spring where the weeds aren’t coming, I just keep the chemicals in the shed. On my farm it seems I always get hit with broadleaves, but there are some years where I don’t get the grasses emerging so I can leave the Roundup in the jug. 

So yes, conservation tillage does change your herbicide program; you need to plan to kill weeds in the spring. In terms of pests and bugs, I don’t know that there’s any significant difference. I’ve heard that grubs and things like that can be more of an issue for guys who are also cover croppers, but I’m not an expert in that area. More living plants are a good thing for soil health, but they also make a good habitat for pests. 

A Story About Stronger Soil

The end goal with strip till (and no till) is improved soil health. In our fields, we don’t get the big, blocky chunks of soil that you can get with conventional tillage. Most of our soils are very mellow with an assortment of small aggregates. When you quit doing conventional tillage, you allow the earthworms and other soil organisms to do your tillage for you. They open up the soil to the point where you don’t have a hardpan in it. 

One spring, my tile guy was out digging in one of my fields because I had a couple of tile lines that were broken. After he was finished, he called me up and said, “you have to see this” and sent me a picture of the hole he dug. As he told me, when he digs in people’s fields, he’s almost guaranteed to run into a hardpan between eight to twelve inches down, and from there, the soil comes out in big hard chunks when digging it out. In contrast, he said my soil was the “nicest, most mellow and loose soil” he’s seen.  

The spot where he was digging was on the corner of an acreage—an area where we have rows going this way and rows going that way; an area on which we’re always turning around. So this spot had everything working against it in terms of the potential for compaction—standing water, lots of traffic, etc. But the soil was super well aggregated there, which was pretty cool to hear. And then he went to another spot out in the middle of an eighty on a different farm that I run and found the exact same soil conditions. 

Let Nature Structure Your Soil

When you get rid of hardpan, this allows for oxygen to move deeper into the soil, which allows the biology that are releasing all the nutrition to go deeper into the soil to access more mineral nutrition that’s bound up in the soil. Then, as your roots go down, there’s more nutrition available deeper in the soil profile, which, in turn, is going to build organic matter—all because the soil biology is able to be more active.

George has a statistic in his marketing materials for CarbonWorks that aerobic bugs can break down manure nineteen times faster than anaerobic bugs can. Following that concept, you can see why our aerobic bugs are so important to healthy soil structure. And that to me is what conservation tillage is all about—improving the health of our soils. Yes, it was a major management decision for me as well; I needed to cut passes in order to both operate a farm and run an agronomy business. But at the end of the day, it’s our soil health that will determine the success of our farms into the future.

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