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Is compaction costing you money? Do you have compaction on your farm? Digging into that, literally, here in this episode
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of Demco's Built to Move series, agronomy simplified to help you farm better. All right. Compaction, it's a big problem.
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A lot of people gloss over it. "No, we don't have that here. Oh, my soil type doesn't lend itself to compaction." I've heard all the stories.
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I think there's compaction that's greater than people realize because the equipment is massively big and you got to get the crop in and out.
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100%. So either you grab the spade, you get a pedometer, or you could get like an EC sled. A lot of companies are running those to start finding where that
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compaction layer is. You're digging down, you're seeing how tight is this soil.
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Tight soil is a bad day because it doesn't allow water to go down. As far as roots exploring throughout the ground to find nutrients,
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compaction limits all that. So if- Well, compaction leads to some erosion, but the other one, I think in these economic situations we're in in farming right now, you're putting all this crop
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input, $200, $300 per acre of crop input, and I've read some of the agronomic stuff. It doesn't allow any of that fertility or any of those crop inputs to actually get
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to where they can help the plant because the plant can't- Can't get to it. Correct. It slows down root growth or oxygen as a
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whole. So there's many issues with compaction that need to be addressed, and there's a lot of different ways to fix that compaction.
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It might be tillage in some areas. It might be cover crops in some areas. There's many ways to skin that cat. The common answer usually is to deny it-
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... or say, "I'll just till it." Now, this field was in-line ripped in November. Did it help?
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That is a good question. As wet as it's been here, obviously tillage, they know it seems to be going in quite well.
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But as much moisture as here, I'm not seeing much sitting on top of the ground. I think it's doing the trick here.
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Got it. So what do we do? Can we avoid, I mean with the equipment the size it is, avoiding it other than you should stay off of wet ground?
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That'd be number one. Prevention. Is prevention's worth a pound of cure kind of thing? A bigger footprint as you're carrying that equipment across the ground.
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Don't get the skinny tires. Don't push your window for getting out into a field after moisture, especially that's a big deal here right now.
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Can I salvage a compacted field? And if so, how long does it take? Oh, boy. That would depend on the area.
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But maybe you add more drainage tile to move the water away. Maybe you do this in-line ripping.
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Maybe you start to do a strip till cover crop rotation and see some fruits of that over a few years. But depending on the area, there's a lot of options you
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have. Do you think an economic case is to be made? There's a lot of people that are losing crop yield or input expense to compaction and they don't even know
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it. I think they have an idea. They just don't know the full dollar amount that's tied to it.
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Got it. His name is Jason DeCavers. I'm Damian Mason. We're coming at you in Demco's Built to Move series, agronomy simplified to help you farm better, talking about compaction. Get out there.
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What's that tool called again? Earth optics scanner, a pedometer, either of those. Find out if you have compaction and if it's costing you. It most likely is.
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