Evaluating No-Till Farming: Cost Savings and Soil Health Considerations

00:00:00 Hey guys, it's Temple from Extreme Ag. You know, uh, a couple guys asked me some questions the other day. 00:00:05 You know, we're going into 2025 and we're talking about can we save some money and how can we save some money? 00:00:11 And one of the questions that can kind of came up was, can we save money by not making those tillage practices that we generally make, you know, 00:00:17 whether it's a vertical till or whether it's actual tillage where we go in and deep rip and, you know, work the ground up. 00:00:25 Can we actually go into a no-till program? Uh, we do a lot of strip till out here where we are. I seem to be pretty happy with, with 00:00:32 that system that we have. Um, but I am gonna go into a no-till program this year, somewhat on some acres. 00:00:39 Does that save money? Well, this can be argued, you know, so one thing that you need to think about is you gotta have a really 00:00:47 strong no-till game. And when I'm talking about that, I'm talking about your planner and your fertility, your, your, 00:00:52 not only just your fertility program, we're talking about your chemistry program. All of those things ramp up. 00:00:59 I mean, just look at the amount of fodder that's out here that you gotta, you gotta cut through. 00:01:03 So you got only gotta cut through it. You gotta separate that and you gotta get that outta the way. 00:01:08 And that is, that can be problematic, um, for some guys, you know, depending on 00:01:12 how much residue breakdown that they had. A lot of things happen in a no-till situation. Yes, it does help ramp up biology 00:01:20 because we know that when we go out there with a tillage practice, we're actually cutting back on biology. 00:01:26 We're destroying some of it. Um, I use anhydrous. I know that anhydrous destroys biology. Well, we're starting to get to a point 00:01:34 where we're adding more biology as we go in there. But, uh, one thing that I want you to think about, you know, if you go into a no-till program, 00:01:42 you are ramping up your biology, some natural occurring biology that you have out there. But the other thing is, is we fight a lot 00:01:48 of few cerium out here and pythium in our, in our soils, and I know a lot of people do all across the country, one 00:01:55 of the problems that we see is, um, we need to ramp up our, our fungicide. We, we've done this before 00:02:02 and we have more problems than this. You know, especially when you get into, uh, wheat or, uh, cereal grain 00:02:09 that's out here, you know, it's jumping. Those, those diseases are jumping from that one host and that pathogen goes into the new host, 00:02:18 which is our, our corn crop. So one of the things that we're trying this year is, you know, with some biologicals out there, you know, 00:02:24 like organics and there's a bunch of other ones out there, we're trialing the fact that we think that some of 00:02:30 that biology helps work with us. You know, it's going to help our soil and it's gonna make it more mellow. 00:02:35 And then we're, we're building a, a better soil so we can get more efficiency out of our fertility. But we're also looking at the fact that, you know this, 00:02:44 if we have that disease pressure out there, there's some data out there showing that we can cut back on the disease pressure 00:02:51 by aid in biology, and maybe we won't have to use that real heavy dose of fungicide. Fungicides work extremely well, 00:02:58 But they also kill some of the natural biology that we have out here in our soul. So there's some of the things that we really gotta watch. 00:03:05 So what I'm saying is, is can no-till save you money? Um, yes, it can, it will save you that tillage past, but at what cost? 00:03:14 Sometimes we need to think about that. Not only that, think about this. When you're out here and you're putting a tillage pass in 00:03:21 and you, you're spreading phosphorous, so for instance, or you're spreading your lime to get your, your pH levels up. 00:03:29 When you put that on top of all of this stove that's out here, how much is actually getting to the soil? So when you can take those things 00:03:37 and like I do, I strip till a lot of stuff, so, or I band my fertility, you can make it work very well. But keep in mind, you probably ought 00:03:46 to think about banding some fertility to make your whole program a little bit better. 00:03:50.015 --> 00:03:50.605