You don’t need to move fertilizer openers if you side dress the opposite way you planted

Thanks for subscribing Ron! I too follow Just A Few Acres. Pete is great!

Will do! I have quite a bit of footage from the summer, but had trouble finding time to do the editing. Getting caught up now in preparation for harvest.

@@ravenviewfarm yes please keep us updated when you get the time.... Hope you have a good safe harvest 👍✌️

Hey Budd! You're right about that. Lots of folks get focused on bushels per acre. For me, the best measure of success is dollars per acre. If I can reduce my fertilizer and chemical costs while still making a decent yield, AND improve the performance and resiliency of my soil in the process, then I'm coming out ahead of the guys that are focused strictly on yield alone. And with the reduction in tillage, I have greatly reduced fuel usage and replacement wear parts for the cultivator, disk, plow, chisel plow, etc. That has allowed me some extra money to invest in really tuning up our planting equipment to perform as well as it possibly can. It's all just one big balancing act!

An excellent idea. Since this was our first time doing a split application of fertilizer, it just made sense to work with what we have. If a good deal comes along on a second planter I would consider picking it up, but it would have to be extremely cheap, because it's really not difficult at all to remove and reinstall the row units.

@@ravenviewfarm I bet there are four row units buried in the weeds all over the country that have had one or more row units pulled. I bet you could haul one home and recoup the cost by selling off the individual row units as replacements.

We have relatively small fields. That would make for a pretty long rig on the turnarounds. Also, the drill is just a little bit wide, and almost runs over the neighboring rows. It would be tough to compensate on hillsides. Honestly though it might be worth a shot to save fuel and time. I'll have to give that some thought.

Thomas M You’re correct! I’m a licensed general contractor, doing handyman work and small remodeling projects. I’d like to farm full time, and that is the ultimate goal, but for now this works out pretty well. When there’s farm work to do I just make a hole in my schedule to accommodate it. I don’t have the fertilizer numbers in front of me, and that brain space has been reallocated after a few months, but I’ll dredge up the paperwork and follow up on the question!

@@ravenviewfarm Ok thank you ! It's not important if you roll with your tyres on the corn of the headland ?

Hey Airplane Doctor. I'll be the first to say I appreciate your perspective. The difference between you and other guys I've talked to, is that you actually went out and tried it. So many farmers dismiss regenerative practices before they ever make any kind of attempt. You actually did a trial before you reached your conclusion, so I have to respect that. That said, as a mentor for the Minnesota Soil Health Coalition, if we were having a conversation about why your interseeding failed, I would have a whole bunch of questions for you. I would ask about your row spacing, herbicide program, tillage program, what species of cover crops you tried to interseed and at what lb/ac rates, what growth stage the corn was at when you interseeded, what equipment you used to do the interseeding, where you're located, what the weather conditions were, and so on and so forth in an effort to understand the WHOLE picture of what you were doing for those growing years. Then we would put our heads together and try to determine the reason(s) for failure, and see if there were tweaks we could make that would lead to improved results. Now, that's just an example and I'm not advising you in an official capacity, so no need to lay all of that out in the comments section of KZfaq here. ;0) All I can say is that we've had great success with interseeding over the last three years, and have seen our weed pressure decline each year and our soil quality and structure improve. We're still making tweaks to the system all the time, so it's never perfect, but we're not really shooting for perfection so much as improvement. Cheers!

Hey James. Sorry this reply is months overdue. To sum it all up, between our initial application at planting time, and this side-dress application, we applied about 135 units of N to this corn crop. From that, we averaged about 175 bushels/acre. In our big 18 acre field, where the ground is particularly rich, I know we ran over 200 in some spots. It was counterbalanced by the 8 acre field where the soil isn't so hot. That probably ran closer to 140. Overall I was VERY pleased with the results. It may not have been a record breaking crop, but it was considerably more profitable than a lot of our past years. For reference, that 135 units of N was about 25% less fertilizer than we would have historically applied.

Good guess, but we did a little better than that. Should yield be the primary goal?

Couldn't agree more! For a lot of guys its just fear of the unknown. I'd never go back to heavy tillage and strict monocultures.

What cover crop are you using

Clover adds 250lbs of nitrogen to corn?