The benefits of no-tilling in heavy soil | Farm School | Successful Farming

foreign out in nature out here every single day that is living the dream take one so I I farm in the Red River Valley which is a is a higher clay soil when it rains it's sticky your shoes get really really big when I was farming initially we were you know a straight up conventional Farm we uh corn soybeans for the most part we chisel plow you know once or twice in the fall would feel cultivate in the springtime I started to see and notice a lot of wind erosion water erosion and you'd drive by after a heavy rain and you could literally see the water was a different color coming off of your field I didn't always have the best chisel plower I didn't have the correct chopping corn head so we didn't always get ourselves the best seed bed that we were looking for we went the other way to do less tillage and in turn we were creating ourselves a better seed bed so we tried less tillage and less tillage and pretty soon we were in a no-till situation cover crops were kind of a Missing Link in the no-till it's moisture that's our Factor that's keeping us out of the field since we've added the cover crops we've gotten our better infiltration and gotten things to dry out quicker and faster so in a corn soybean rotation that doesn't give us a lot of places to add the cover crops to add that value so we've added n peas and oats and barley sunflowers gives us all these different opportunities to get cover crops planted at different times different species and truly helped really build the soil in the biology aspects if I always care to shovel the one thing that you do see right away when you use a shovel is if you got worms years ago you'd use a shovel and I couldn't find any worms now every shovel full we have uh 5 8 10 15 worms and other things that we see when we're using the shovel is you know is this soil starting to build Aggregates are they start is the soil starting to stick together is it sticking on their Roots that's where we get our infiltration that's how we got to get our water to move through the soil so when it comes to plant and core and I'm just using my standard planner where we haven't added anything other than some spoked closing Wheels on the back of the planner when it comes to small grains or soybeans we use a single disc air drill and that's pretty much standard as well other than we do put a different spoke closing wheel on the back of that also probably out there checking a little more often I'm doing a lot of digging in the field every planter pass when we start we're out on the hands and knees really checking the seed depth make sure we're not hair painting so one of the things I've truly seen since I've gotten with the no-till cover crop system is erosion my soil is not moving after a big rain event you can go drive along a ditch and see that there's no visible soil being washed into the ditch [Music] one of the sayings is uh no-till no yield um I think we've kind of proven that wrong with no-till and cover crops thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Successful Farming

Views: 3,114

Keywords: successful farming, agriculture.com, agriculture, farm school, no tilling, no tilling in heavy soil, tyler zimmerman, red river valley, leonard north dakota, north dakota farmer, corteva farm school, stop soil erosion, soil erosion, no till farming, cover crops

Id: VTQb4EHRIPU

Length: 3min 48sec (228 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 11 2023