Strip Tilled Cover Crops with Millborn Seeds and Asmus Farm Supply скачать в хорошем качестве

Strip Tilled Cover Crops with Millborn Seeds and Asmus Farm Supply

Millborn Seeds' Forage and Cover Crop Specialist, Justin Fruechte, teams up with Bil Schrader and Zack Smith, both of Asmus Farm Supply, to discuss Millborn's Nutrient Builder cover crop near land in Rake, IA. BIL SCHRADER: We are in the same field that we were just talking from a couple minutes ago outside of Rake, IA. Zack Smith, my fellow employee at Asmus Farm Supply, who farms...this is his field. What Zack did here is go out with a strip till bar and did some strip till right into the standing cover crop. You can see it worked up really nicely. I think Zack is excited about the prospects of how this is going to turn out. How long has this been planted, Zack? ZACK SMITH: So this field that we are in was seeded between the 29th and 31st of July this season. We were lucky to get a rain shortly - about a week - after we seeded it. It was really dry conditions so we were concerned about how it was going to pop up. But once we got the rain the mix came up beautiful. And it's been nice because we've been able to see all the species, pretty much all the species emerge in our mix. We were pretty hesitant. This field was PP (prevented plant), and then we patterned tiled it and worked it a couple of times. So we didn't really know after working it that much how well the ground would handle and let the cover crop take off. It's really exceeded our expectations. It's been exciting. My concerns never doing this before, like a lot of farmer's concerns were how are we going to handle this. So being a strip tiller I didn't know how my machine was going to come out here...if it was going to plug up and be a ball of green or not. So this past weekend, I said I'm going to hook it up and come out and have a test run and see...and once I dropped it, I didn't go very far and I knew right away this was going to work very well. I have a Krause Gladiator. It really did a nice job of clearing the residue out of the way and not wrapping around the shank. I didn't have any kind of plugging issues. The nice is you look here at the residue that's left. This is four or five days after we did this...it's really starting to break down quite nicely from what we have here in the field. I'm excited to have the cover crop build the soil and with strip till help maintain what we started here...and not do too much disturbance...to keep the benefits of all the great rooting and biological break down will happen for next year. BIL SCHRADER: So essentially about 2 months worth of growth that you strip tilled directly into? ZACK SMITH: Correct. Yes. JUSTIN FRUECHTE: I think you start talking about a really important topic. And that's the management of this cover crop as soon as we're doing with it or we think we have received the benefit from it. And I think strip tilling, if you are a strip tiller, it's a perfect way to come in here and at least start that residue process of breaking it down. Like Zack was saying, when you hit this stuff, there's hardly any cellulose built up in any of these plants and no lignin content. And so it's not like a dried cornstalk that hangs around for such a long time. There's a lot of moisture in these plants and when you knock them down or root them up, they start that decomposition process very fast. That's exactly what's going to happen with a frost. If you have a stand that you're not too concerned with the amount of growth that you have. Just a simple frost and freezing throughout the Winter is going to take care of a lot of that growth. And you're going to come back in the Spring and be surprised with how little material is left on top of the ground. I think from a management side, sticking with what your normal schedule is works great. And if you're not concerned with how much growth you have out there and that ground warming up in the Spring, just let it freeze out. Let it be. Be patient with how that stuff is going to break down. --- More information available at http://www.millbornseeds.com/cover.htm