When some farmers make the transition from conventional tillage to a strip-till or no-till program, they use vertical tillage as a type of bridge between the two. We talked with Jeremy Swanson about the benefits and downsides of vertical-till implements when your goal is to minimize tillage on your farm. 

Sizing Residue for a Smooth Transition

I don’t have extensive experience running a vertical-till machine: as I’ve mentioned before, we need to think about tillage from the standpoint of spring planting—what do we need to do to set up that perfect seedbed that will give our plants the best start? We need to size and incorporate residue and take care of the soil compaction as much as we can. Anything beyond that starts to become recreational tillage. 

In this series I’ve talked a lot about my tillage program and how Dad and I made the jump into strip till. Some guys use vertical tillage as a sort of stepping stone to strip till or no till. They mainly use it to manage corn stalks; it makes them feel better to run the vertical-till machine across the field and size up that residue. In other words, some farmers might not feel comfortable putting no-till beans directly into corn stubble so they’ll do their conventional-tillage pass in the fall with a vertical-till machine. Some guys may make a second pass with it in the spring as well to get everything leveled off for planting.

I’ve even seen guys do vertical till on bean stubble in the fall. Around here in northern Iowa, bean yields have increased over the years. With that, the plants seem to be much bigger and bushier than they used to be. Combines differ a bit on how well they size and chop that residue, and some guys feel more comfortable running a vertical till machine over it to chop it up a bit more.

And, as another benefit, a pass with the vertical-till machine helps level off ruts and break up compaction from a year’s worth of tracking across the field. If I had a vertical-till machine, I think it would be great to run it every four to five years just to level everything off quickly. One would be handy, but in my operation, I can’t justify spending seventy thousand dollars for a tool that would only make it out of the grove once in a blue moon. 

A Neighbor’s Cultivator Conundrum

There’s a guy I harvest with who runs a field cultivator on bean stubble ahead of his corn and no-tills his beans. So he’s not doing a lot of tillage in his overall system. Well, he started to have problems running his field cultivator. In some places he’d have maybe two years of corn stalk stubble present plus last year’s bean stubble on top of that. All that residue wasn’t flowing through his field cultivator. 

This is one case where a vertical-till pass in spring would help size that residue and help it flow through the field cultivator and achieve a nicer seedbed. We handled his situation differently, though. He had me spray some residue-degrading biology on a couple of his fields to try to speed up the breakdown. Guess which fields were easier to work with his cultivator? The fields on which we had sprayed the biology. It goes to show you that there is always more than one way to handle a problem you encounter on your farm.

The Risk of Blowing Residue

One risk of making a pass with the vertical-till machine in fall is having your residue blowing all over the neighborhood. You cut all that residue up into small pieces, and if you don’t get rain or snow on it fairly quickly, that light and fluffy residue can easily become airborne. If you get a crazy wind, the residue will blow like crazy. It will all end up in the ditches, a fence line, or your neighbor’s grove or front yard. 

That’s one of the reasons why I prefer using residue-degrading bugs to help process residue instead. I think you can be more effective with a tool you already have. You apply the bugs with your sprayer versus a huge tractor and another tillage implement to accomplish the same goal in the end. 

I understand wanting to use vertical till as a stepping stone between one hundred percent conventional tillage and a conservation tillage scenario, but I think this is another case where you need to slow down and really figure out what you’re trying to accomplish. Is there an opportunity to use biology to your advantage? Can you make better use of the equipment you already have? Sometimes you might come away with more questions than answers, but that’s where you can lean on other farmers' experiences with the same issues you’re facing. Find what has worked for other growers and keep an open mind.