Iowa Corn: Steve Berger No Till Planter

so this is our corn planter and this particular machine is eight years old just had eight seasons on it now and we pull it with a ten year old tractor and we feel that this machine here you know about five foot link from the road cleaner to the press wheel is probably one of the most important tools we have in the farm we don't do a lot of other trips other than you know we spray and we plant and we might side this you know so we don't do a lot of different activities so we do spend a lot of time and we spend quite a bit of our money in this rail unit here but just making different improvements and that's where we start with the road cleaner where we want to move that residue off to the side and that's probably one of the most important pieces add-ons that I would recommend for a farmer to get and this particular road cleaner is a precision clean sweep that which we can activate and change it the height of it from the cab and so we can change it on the go which is really important every field situation might be a little bit different and so having the ability to change the pitch of that row cleaner going through the field is pretty important you want to get that even spread and so that that residues evenly spread across the field that we don't have it in clumps well now we're out there with 40-foot Draper heads on these combines now we're a little bit behind again with the straw spreaders and so we're trying to get that straw evenly spread in the fall and so that's a challenge and now that's why it makes this row cleaner you know pretty important again so we're in areas where we don't get that straw spread quite right we feel that that's an important important design the next thing that we probably want to talk about is the disc opener on this particular planner you know ours are 15 inch the double disc opener on this John Deere planer or the 15 inch I've got the heavy three and a half millimeter blade on there and we want to make sure that we've got our two two and a half inch where these blades come together and so that it's really important to get those discs open or set right this is really the only tillage tool that we have on the farm and that's making that V trench for that seed to fit into and so we want to make sure that those Coulter's are touching and with that to the two and a half inch where they come together now that changes by the thickness of the blade and by different planners so definitely look at your operator's manual it will vary by by the planner and so on this particular one we we try to get those disc opener set up and through time they'll wear when they get down to about 14 and a half to fourteen five eighths you know it's time to change you so that's the disc opener is a pretty pretty important part to pay attention to many years ago the the depth wheel here is the next one we talked about years ago we started out with a different kind of a depth wheel we started with the reduced inner diameter gauge wheel the depth wheel that goes on the side this one that we've got on here now is the John Deere where it has as it gets closer to the disc opener instead of being reduced in a diameter it comes up and so this is the one the standard one that they started with we used to have these on years ago and so as the disc opener would go through the field it would in a no-till situation is trying to push that soil over and they would compact that sidewall and so the idea that reduced in a diameter tire or this is one that the Case IH planner would have we put these on so it would leave room for that soil to move over and so we wouldn't have a side wall that's compacted as we change in systems into a no-till cover crop our souls become a lot more mellow bein and so we can maybe afford to put a little compaction so we get that V trench in there and so what I'm really saying is we use these reduced inner diameter gauge wheels for about 20-some years an hours scene where we're wanting to switch back back to a regular a gauge wheel or depth control wheel and so I mean the key point here is you know we have to kind of look at your own fields and decide what it's going to take to get that perfect seed to soil contact and we see in a lot of cases where this death wheel does a better job we have two sets where we can change these in and out but the key thing is is whatever it takes on your farm to get that seed to soil contact you know we have to make adjustments and this is this one example to it I just move it on back the next thing we want it that we added on where the Ketan see perimeters you know we added these on many years ago and then in this case what this does this is the firming point that pushes that seed to the bottom of that V trench and the bottom of the furrow and so we want that seed to be at the bottom of the V trench with they deceived the soil contact and that's what the key to seed firmer does and we'd like to see about a pound of pressure on there you can measure that with a fish scale and this the key to seed firmer over time is it's a poly if the poly made product and it'll absorb moisture and it'll lose its strength and so this is something that you're going to want to go through and check each season and you may want to change these out and put new and so on and so we feel that you know that's that's a pretty important item that have on and we also run our starter fertilizer through there we have a little bit of a 624 six a pop up fertilizer about three gallons say because that we add on and in this case now I don't have any insecticide on this planter and so I had insecticide to my my starter fertilizer and I think you know like a bifenthrin or I capture to get the seed attacking insects that's what I'm going after is the wire worms the grubs those type of seed attacking insects is what we're going after in this case we're not going after the river we control that to our beauty products in our corn of BT trades but I feel you know as I mentioned there's about four things that one of them treating the insects and that's where we will add the insecticide and so through the PVC so we've kind of talked about we've got the road cleaner the disc opener we talked about you know the depth control wheel the gauge wheel the next item is is the spike closing wheel the Martin spike closing wheel this would fracture that sidewall and so that corn could could rid out because one of the problems in no-till if you're planning into wetter cooler so is you're going to find that you might have a compacted sidewall or this would the Martin closing spike we would take that out this happens to be a 15-inch spike wheel and this would be the same type of reel that's put on the on the road pointer except they're inverted left to right you want to make sure the beveled edges is on the inside with the point the last thing leaving the ground is the point and so there is a left and right position we want to make sure you have that right you don't want to make a rotary hoe out of this you just basically want to just collapse that that sidewall compaction come on what we've seen over time is you know as you a dry cover crop to your field our soils start to get really mellow you see our fields are almost like flowerpot soils for years and years of just rich growing and so we're starting to see the soil structure changed as I mentioned and so we almost feel that maybe we don't have have enough compaction in there you know a lot of times we're trying to take that compaction now that's like well well maybe we don't have enough in there where we might go back and just add the regular closing way or the press wheel and we might put this back on we're going to experiment with it this year and I think it's all about just getting enough weight to get that seed to soil contact is if you're planning to write cover crop you have a lot of Ritt mass a lot of air space and so we we've seen situations where maybe we didn't have quite the perfect stand the seed wasn't wasn't fully germinated and we we suspect maybe we didn't get that packed in there and I think we're gonna go back and and add the rubber closing wheel which is a which is standard that what a lot of farmers use in in certain cases you know if you're in in drier areas and you know even the cast closing wheel it might be an option but it's field by field farm by farm and every farm is different and there's really no one right answer you know end up the one thing I didn't mention on the on the road cleaner is we don't want to till the soil with us so all we want to do is just move the residue and some would even say you want to see this may be turning it 75 to 80% of the speed you're going through the field maybe just you know turning slower than what you're actually traveling through the fields removing the residue and not the soil because we feel that we've got the perfect seed bed out there through the no-till cover crops you know you can't make a better seed bed and we don't want to go through until that soil you know if we think we need to add a little more weight to it and by putting a different you know press wheel on some farmers will opt to put you know one rubber press we along with one with us with a spike closing wheel and go halfway and so there's a lot of different variations that you can experiment with the one thing you really want to have with the spike closing wheel is the is the drag chain here the close is a square drag train that it will pull some soil over if there's any open gaps or any holes that you poke in there that'll pull like a cup full of soil over in you know cover to make sure that furrows smooth off and we found that that's working really good we mentioned that nitrogen is very important years ago we used to have a fertilizer opener like in a 2 by 2 or a 2 by 3 2 inches over 2 inches down where we would put our nitrogen on over maybe over 3 inches we in our case we're working with 32 sent uan nitrogen and we found that those rail units were expensive they were heavy it was just another form of tillage it required maintenance and so we opted to take those off and then so we just put like a Y splitter we're weird actually dribbling the nitrogen on the surface so they call that a - bio 2x0 and that's where we're dribbling our nitrogen above the road and we're splitting it on both sides in our case we're getting on about 60 pounds of nitrogen around roughly 15 to 16 gallon an acre I have talked to farmers that have put up to 200 pounds of nitrogen on following this row I think at 28% up around 70 gallons and an acre would be what they run through there and so you know that's an option and we find that this has worked really well over the years and it's it's really a simple it's an expensive way to add on compared to a row or to a fertilizer opener and a lot of farmers have gone this direction Kansas State University in the University of Minnesota have looked at the different ways to apply nitrogen with the planner and they see that this works just as well as if you're over you know injecting it over you know - you know 2 by 3 situation and so to me I think that's a that's a pretty important set of data on that planner you

Channel: Iowa Corn

Views: 49,702

Keywords: ICGA, iowa, Iowa Corn, Iowa Corn Growers, planter, steve berger, corn, agriculture, safe food, corn planter, farm, farming, iowa farmer

Id: XgvhWlgCQFA

Length: 11min 57sec (717 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2016