Strip-Tillers Need a Plan B After Tough Post-Harvest Conditions
If you found it tough going in fields this fall post-harvest and use strip tillage, you might need to regroup and consider other options, according to Ken Ferrie, Farm Journal Field Agronomist and owner of Crop-Tech Consulting, Heyworth, Ill.
“In a year like this when the stripping doesn't go so good, we get done so late and can't get our gas on, or it's too wet and we can't get our strips built, we need a plan B to go to,” he explains.
One decision might be to move to no-till. “But if you’re not set up for no-till with your equipment, that's a little bit tougher. Or, like in this year, we left a lot of tracks out there from the combine and grain carts, which create a tough seedbed for the no-tiller,” he says. “We might think about changing our tools up.”
Here are two options for making a tool change:
Option 1 – Consider using a row freshener.
In the video posted below, Ferrie shows how the row freshener does tillage and cleans the residue upfront, then does berming and ridging and finally, the seedbed preparation in one pass without a knife – so you don’t have air pockets in the spring.
“Running a knife in the spring, especially in our central-Illinois clays, leaves too much risk of drying out and then having a poor seedbed,” he explains.
Option 2 – Consider using a vertical harrow.
“But I wouldn't run it in the fall when it's wet,” he says. “Hold your horses and put on a fall burndown. Then, come back in the spring and run the harrow anywhere from three days to a week – or maybe even 10 days ahead of planting – to freshen up the surface. That will let you get in there and plant and knock out some of those combine and grain-cart tracks that we put in this year.”
One caution, Ferrie says, is when you go out in spring the soil conditions in your fields need to be good. “You don’t want to create more wheel tracks with the harrow,” he says. “Be patient to make this another good plan B.”
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