No-Tillers Have a Field Day in Gap

Dick Wanner
Lancaster Farming Staff

GAP, Pa. — If you want to start a no-till program on your farm, the most important part of your program isn’t the kind of planter you use, it’s not the crop variety you plant, it’s not the kind of cover crop you use, and it’s not the herbicide you use to knock your cover crop down before planting.

For the beginning no-tiller, the most important part of the program is patience.

Gideon Stoltzfus said it. Jeff Graybill said it. Grant Troop said it. And Joel Myers said it. This quartet of presenters is a virtual college campus of no-till knowledge and experience, and they shared both with a group of about 30 interested farmers on the morning of a no-till field day on Friday, June 26.

The event was held on a day perfect for crops, but a bit hot and muggy for people. Hosted by Penn State Cooperative Extension and the Lancaster Conservation District, the location at 561 White Horse Road provided both an object lesson in no-till practices, and a showcase for the equipment made and sold at the site by Pequea Planter.

Gideon Stoltzfus, who owns Pequea Planter and specializes in no-till equipment, spoke specifically about his own no-till experience and the role it has played in his work with other Amish farmers. One of those farmers is his son Daniel, who farms nearby.

Daniel went to a complete no-till operation in 1999, according to his father, and took a definite yield loss for the first three or four years. That is the norm for no-till. Stoltzfus said he knew of too many farmers who toughed it out through the first three years, then quit because they got frustrated with the yield. “I’m convinced that David is getting better yields now than he would be getting if he were still plowing. He can get 30 tons of corn silage after triticale.”

H. Grant Troop, the no-till agronomist with Penn State Extension’s Capital Region, has been a long-time booster of the no-till approach. He reviewed some of the basics with the group, then posed a question, “Does anyone know what green-bridging is?”

No hands went up in the group. Troop explained that after a cover crop has been knocked down by herbicide, it needs to be dead for two-and-a-half to three weeks before planting a crop of beans or corn. “It needs to be good and brown before you go in to plant,” said Troop. “Cutworm moths look for someplace green to lay their eggs. When the eggs hatch, if they have something green to eat, they will be around when your corn comes up. But if everything around them is dead and brown, they won’t survive long enough to threaten the crop.”

Troop also talked about insecticides, but said they don’t do anything for slugs, which can be a major threat to corn. The trick is to apply insect controls on the rows, but keep it off the residue. Keeping an insect population in the cover crop residue is one way to keep slugs under control, Troop said. Kill the insects and slugs will eat your corn.

Slot closure was also an agenda item. A slot that isn’t closed properly will eventually open up as the soil goes through wet and dry cycles. The opened slots provide a kind of buffet for slugs, which can move from one seed to the next. The best way to close the slots is to use interlacing rollers behind the planter, rather than solid wheels.

Jeff Graybill, an agronomy educator with the Lancaster County Penn State extension office led the group on a tour of no-till fields on the Stoltzfus farm.

A variety of cover crops were planted in test rows to gauge their effectiveness at holding moisture and discouraging weeds. Graybill said he likes crimson clover and triticale, alone and in combination, and he passed out sheets showing dry matter yields and nutrient production with different species. In addition to crimson clover and triticale, cover crops on the test plots included oats, radishes, annual winter peas and annual ryegrass.

Joel Myers, technical coordinator for the Pennsylvania No-till Alliance, dug a trench in a field that had not been tilled for more than 30 years. The soil profile in the trench showed a sandy subsoil below a thick layer of topsoil.

Myers pointed out the bountiful roots from the corn plants, the earthworm holes and a few holes from nightcrawlers. He told the group that tilled ground can show a lot of earthworm activity, normally confined to the top layer of the soil. No-till fields tend to show much more nightcrawler activity. Nightcrawlers create wider and deeper burrows — the thickness of a lead pencil — and can go down to 48 inches.

As a demonstration of how quickly no-till soil can accept water, he poured a bucket of purple dye into a test ring. It soaked into the ground in minutes.

Contact Dick Wanner at rwanner.eph@lnpnews.com or by phone at (717) 419-4703.