Iowa farmer Jeremy Swanson grew up like many farmers—long days in the tractor cab working on the family farm. Today, Jeremy’s farm is entirely strip till and no till. Yes, he still has conventional tillage implements, but they only see dirt on special occasions. In this series’ first article, we dig into Jeremy’s motivations behind the switch to conservation tillage and the impact it has had on his farm. 

Cutting Teeth on Tillage

I grew up on a conventional farm doing conventional tillage. That’s where I cut my teeth—on the ripper in the fall and field cultivator in the spring. At that time, the conventional tillage tools were not as good as they are today. Most of them were some sort of a V ripper or inline ripper. To me, they struggled to manage standing corn stalks. Even corn heads at that time didn’t manage the stalks anything close to the way they can today. You were left with a lot longer, more intact pieces of residue that you had to deal with. And those inline rippers of the day struggled to effectively bury that trash. 

That meant running the classic old stalk chopper. That was the other job I remember as a kid; driving back and forth over the field cutting the stalks, which was quite satisfying, as you could clearly see your progress. The way we were doing tillage at the time, we were essentially making four passes across the field: The stalk chopper, the ripper in fall, and a couple of spring passes to get everything leveled off and prepare a nice seedbed. And I think that was fairly common on many farms. 

First Foray into Conservation Tillage

Somewhere along the way, dad and a neighbor bought a no-till drill together and started drilling soybeans, so we quit doing tillage ahead of beans. We tried that for a number of years. For whatever reason, we quit doing that, and I don’t really remember why. We sold our half of the drill off to the neighbor. I remember a few times that we had the elevator come in and broadcast some beans on, but even then we were doing tillage to work those in. 

The Transition to Strip Till and No Till Begins

At some point, we put our heads together and said, well, the no-till thing is becoming a conversation again, so let’s try it. And that's when we started with strip tillage. The idea just stuck for dad and I. We thought, boy, if we could have one tool and do the tillage for the beans and for the corn in the fall and be done with it, that would be pretty slick. 

Practicality also guided our decision. By that time, grandpa was out of the operation. Mom was still running tillage tools, but she was also working off the farm by then. We were slowly moving toward the reality that dad was going to be the only full-time person on the farm. So it was a big deal to be able to eliminate passes and the amount of equipment that needed maintenance. 

To get our start with conservation tillage, we were able to utilize one of the FSA funding mechanisms. If I remember correctly, we applied under the CSP (Conservation Stewardship Program) for some assistance to help pay for our strip-till bar. And so, we became strip tillers.

As we began, we didn’t notice any drop in our yields compared to previous years. However, we weren’t doing side-by-side trials or anything like that. But we were talking with our neighbors, and compared to what they were seeing, our yields weren’t off from anybody else's. So we weren't concerned about losing yield.

A Heavy Rain Proves the Strip Till Advantage

I don’t remember the exact timeline, but about three to four years into strip till we had a heavy rain event. I remember dad calling me the following morning after he’d been out checking fields. He said, “Jeremy, I think the strip-till thing is working.” Our neighbor across the road had a pond in his field, which we’ve come to expect after heavy rains over the decades. Now, the pond in our field was usually even bigger than the neighbor’s. But this time, it wasn’t. 

So we started really paying attention to the water infiltration in our fields compared to some of the surrounding farms. It’s not that we didn’t get ponds in our fields, but they went down as fast as anybody’s and they didn’t get quite as big. Because of this, we felt that we’d been doing something right and that our soils had changed and transitioned. From a drainage standpoint, they were improving, so that was encouraging to see. 

More Wet Weather Brings No Till on Board

Another year or two went by and then we had a very wet fall. We weren’t able to get our strips made with the strip tiller that fall in the corn stalks that would be going to beans the next year. We got part of them done, but not all of them. And then spring rolled around and it was still wet. So we asked ourselves, are we going to take time to run this thing [strip-till bar]? Or should we try some no till and see what happens? We decided to try the no till because it was so wet and muddy that we wouldn’t be making good strips anyway. 

So we tried no till on those acres. In our side-by-side comparison that year, we didn’t lose any yield at all. We were at least the same, if not a pinch better. And so we thought, is it even worth doing the strips for beans? So the next year we did another side-by-side test, this time an intentional one. And again, we didn’t lose any yield. It was at that point that we decided to quit pulling the strip-till bar through those fields. The amount of time, fuel, and wear and tear that we would save made us realize that it was time to move to no till on beans. 

Sticking with Strip Till On Corn

We’re still making the strips ahead of the corn, though. However, for the three years prior to this one, I did some trials comparing strip-till and no-till corn. Across the three years, I was losing an average of five to seven bushels per acre on the no-till acres. 

We can play then with those numbers a bit. At seven-dollar corn, it definitely pays to pull the strip till bar. Three dollar corn? Well, then we have to pay closer attention to which one comes out ahead and we can make those year-to-year decisions based on whether or not the ROI is there. 

Soil Health Has Improved Drastically

I think our overall soil health has improved drastically with the move to strip till and no till. That’s not to say we never use our conventional tillage implements. We’ve done some deep tillage during tiling, probably down to the six to ten inch range, with a disk ripper equipped with parabolic shanks. We’ve pattern tiled a couple of farms in the last few years. To level off those farms properly and back into normal soil conditions, we’ve gone back to some conventional tillage as well.  

But now, we’re right back into our rotation. Since I’m also an agronomist and run a business off the farm, the time savings is critical for our farm as well. Eliminating all those passes and everything that goes along with them has allowed me to keep up with both the farm and my consulting business.