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“There was another thing we had, which was called the No-Till Tigers. And it was a group of people, farmers, that we called the no-till tigers. Going with that, my wife dressed up as a tiger and I carried her on my shoulders when we went to some of the no-till field demonstrations.”
- Dick Foell
This week’s edition of the No-Till Farmer: Influencers & Innovators podcast, we all thrill to no-till. Or maybe we’re all no-till tigers. Whatever you do, remember to farm ugly.
These are a few of the slogans and gimmicks used by this week’s guest, Dick Foell during the early days of no-till farming in the early 1970s. Foell worked at Chevron to promote and develop a then little-known chemical by the name of paraquat, a herbicide that helped move no-tilling from a loose collection of bottom-line minded innovators to a national soil health movement.
Foell talks with No-Till Farmer Editor Frank Lessiter about those early days, the prospect of his retirement years, the tightening regulations for chemicals like atrazine and glyphosate, and more.
Related Content:
Dick Foell: Nothing Too Crazy to Promote No-Till
Country music, gaudy green silk jackets or a dressing his bride up as a tiger, nothing was off-limits to Dick Foell when it came to attracting attention for no-tillage.
No-Till Farmer‘s No-Till Influencers & Innovators Podcast podcast is brought to you by Verdesian Life Sciences.
At Verdesian Life Sciences, we believe that supplying healthy water and soil for the next generation is just as important as supplying efficient nutrients for every crop farmers grow. For us, sustainability and profitability go hand in hand. That’s why we call ourselves The Nutrient Use Efficiency People. We have dedicated ourselves to providing prescriptive nutrient use efficiency solutions that improve plant uptake and reduce fertilizer losses, helping preserve the environment and make the most of your investment. Learn more at vlsci.com or talk to your ag retailer today about Verdesian products.
Full Transcript
Brian O'Connor:
Welcome to the latest episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast. I'm Brian O'Connor, lead content editor for No-Till Farmer. Verdesian sponsors this program, which features stories about the past, present, and future of no-till farming. I encourage you to subscribe to this series, which is available on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn Radio. Subscribing will allow you to receive an alert about upcoming episodes as soon as they are released. I'd like to take a moment to thank Verdesian for supporting our No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast.
Brian O'Connor:
This week's addition to the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast we all thrill to no-till, or maybe we're all no-till tigers, whatever you do remember to farm ugly. These are the few of the slogans and gimmicks used by this week's guest, Dick Foell, during the early days of no-till farming in the early 1970s. Foell worked at Chevron to promote and develop a then little known chemical by the name of Paraquat, an herbicide that helped move no tilling from a loose collection of bottom line minded innovators, to a national soil health movement. Foell talks with No-Till Farmer publisher Frank Lessiter about these early days, the prospect of his retirement years, the tightening regulations for chemicals like atrazine and glyphosate, and more.
Frank Lessiter:
Tell me, Dick, about the first time you ever got involved with no-till.
Dick Foell:
Well it goes back, in actuality it was a little bit of commercial. We had the product that did many things, but one of the things that did is it cleaned the soil or ground so that you didn't have to till it. So we created what was called no-till because discing and plowing were wrecking the lands, and plus using gas and polluting the environment. So our new concept was no-till, which did away with those things and made it easier for farmers to do the job in a cleaner, more environmentally sound way.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. So you're talking about Paraquat and you were at Chevron at the time?
Dick Foell:
Yes, sir. I avoided the word because I wasn't sure about that.
Frank Lessiter:
No, that's fine. We'll talk about it.
Dick Foell:
And then it changed over to Gramoxone.
Frank Lessiter:
Right, right. So what year would you guess you got involved in this?
Dick Foell:
It would've been around '70, I'm trying to think. Probably around '74 to '76.
Frank Lessiter:
Okay, what did you do before that time?
Dick Foell:
I was in the petroleum business.
Frank Lessiter:
Okay, where'd you grow up? Where was home for you?
Dick Foell:
Well I started out in the Bay Area, then went to Southern California, then to the nation, then to the world.
Frank Lessiter:
All right, so what made you change from the oil business to the herbicide business?
Dick Foell:
There was a guy, just trying to think of his name, that came to me and sold me that they needed me more than the petroleum business. And he convinced me to come over to ortho.
Frank Lessiter:
Okay, so when you were in the oil business it was with Chevron too, right?
Dick Foell:
Yes.
Frank Lessiter:
Okay. So what happened along '72? I mean no-till, we started No-Till Farmer in 1972, and there were about 3.2 million acres, and it got a little bigger every year. And then you came along in maybe '73, '74, tell me about some of those early days and what was happening with no-till and how tough a sell it was to farmers?
Dick Foell:
Well it was exciting because I was actually out on the ground with the farmers, and donating product, and doing sample plots with the university, getting them involved and everything else. And then I with some friends, Chicky was telling me I sat at the table in a room and was trying to come up with $6,000. But we came up with the idea, CTIC the Conservation Technology Information Center.
Frank Lessiter:
I was there at the meeting which it was formed at airport [inaudible 00:04:52]. Yep, airport near O'Hare.
Dick Foell:
Yeah.
Frank Lessiter:
So then what happened?
Dick Foell:
Well then it started growing and we started getting more and more people involved like you, and Lynn Henderson, and on and on and on. And the universities picked up on it, the farm part of the university here in Fresno, the ag division and that-
Frank Lessiter:
Oh okay, extension started.
Dick Foell:
It really started multiplying because of the concept and what it meant to the land and to America.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. It's been a tough sell in California for no till, I mean you got so many specialized crops people still think you got to make a lot of trips. No-till's caught on a lot of places but hasn't done all that well in California although it's doing some, right?
Dick Foell:
Frank, you're right. That's the sad thing about it, it was the hardest state of all the states to convert because of the multiple crops and the multiple cropping within a season. Where we really lucked out was cotton because cotton was a once a year crop and it lent itself to no-till.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. Well when you were working with these universities you go back into the '70s and it seems to me like the agronomists weren't very excited about no-till and some of the states had made real progress, it was because of the ag engineers like in Iowa, and Paul Jasa in Nebraska, and some other places, seems to me the ag engineers caught on faster than the agronomist did.
Dick Foell:
Yes, that's true. And those states and places you mentioned were the leaders more than California.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. Well Pennsylvania was another one, there was some agronomists there that got on early. And so what were some of the major, I mean you traveled the United States in those days, were you weren't home very much were you promoting no-till?
Dick Foell:
Yes, and actually I lived in Pennsylvania for a while and I lived in West Virginia, and I was able to get them excited about it. And some of the mid states, the Dakota's, and Carolina's, and Nebraska's, they were a little harder but once they got going and saw the value in it they started leading. Texas was a tough one and the whole south was tough.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. Well we've made great accomplishments in no-till, I mentioned in '72 we think we had about 3.2 million acres, and today it's close to maybe 110 million acres. So progress has definitely been made.
Dick Foell:
Well you remember our slogan, Frank, is farm ugly.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, I want you to explain that and how you came up with that.
Dick Foell:
Well no-till was as you say, when they plowed and disc which farmers liked to see their field, that they had this beautiful clean field. And when we started spraying, sometimes just spraying the centers and weeds were in the furrows, it was really ugly. So we came up with the slogan that farm ugly is the way to farm and it caught on, and of course a lot of jokes and fun with it.
Frank Lessiter:
What did farmers that weren't no-tilling think of the farm ugly program?
Dick Foell:
They weren't conversant against it or for it, the term was every time they told a guy he still had to smile thinking of farm ugly. And it always brought a smile on a farmer's face even though he may have thought the opposite, so it had a good ring to it.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, right. It's short, two words, short and sweet got the message across.
Dick Foell:
And then we used to say it's a thrill to no-till and make a cheer out of it. But another one in no-till we had saved soil, toil, and oil, and that was a slogan that went along with our various ad campaigns. And then there was another thing we had which was called the No-Till Tigers, and it was a group of farmers that we called no-till tigers. But going with that, my wife dressed up as a tiger and I carried her on my shoulders when we went to some of the no-till field demonstrations and praised the no-till tigers.
Frank Lessiter:
Well I remember back in the early days that there were not a lot of no-tillers around, I had some farmers tell me that when the landlord came into their driveway and said, let's go look at our no-till fields today, and he said if it was before the 4th of July we were better off going fishing and not letting him see those fields. But after the 4th of July then you could look at the fields and they looked the hell of a lot better than they had looked in May or June.
Dick Foell:
That's true, that's really true.
Frank Lessiter:
So what do you think were the main reasons we got no-till sold to farmers?
Dick Foell:
I think the concept of not killing and the things that were associated with tilling made sense to farmers, that otherwise the cost of the tractors, and the plows, and the discs, and the fuel, and the fact that they could use a herbicide and eliminate all that made such a big difference. Plus the commercial applicator side of the business started growing like mad because it was giving them land to spray and treat that they hadn't had before.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah.
Dick Foell:
So you had two forces working in that direction.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, it's interesting how that has changed because today, well first of all we've got farmers was a lot more acres, but we got a lot of people that bought their own self-propelled sprayers because when they want to spray they weren't always able to get the commercial guy to do it that day because he was busy with something else. And then what's happened with these big self-propelled sprayers, a guy gets one and say he's got 2,000 acres, and he'll put 6,000 or 7,000 acres on that sprayer during the year because he'll go back and put on fungicides, or insecticides, or even fertilizer later in the year. So a lot of big acreage farmers are running their own self-propelled sprayers these days.
Dick Foell:
Yeah, I see those around here and you're absolutely right. And the technology improved so much and yeah, some of them are almost automated.
Frank Lessiter:
So no-till with Chevron, you go back a long time and there were some early pioneers with Chevron like in Maryland and Delaware, which it really caught on there but they didn't have any huge acreage. But even today we're only about a third of the way to no-tilling all our row crops. But we get a lot of people you ask them what's the value of no-till and they'll say, well it's $100 an acre versus using more tillage, and our guys today are still innovators they're willing to try anything new.
Dick Foell:
That's right, yes. It's a changed agricultural view, and equipment and technology has improved significantly too.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, our average acreage for our No-Till Farmer readers is about 1,400 acres. And just recently had somebody from California tell me the diesel price was I think $7.50 an acre. So I calculated if you had this 1,300 acres and you were no-tilling and your neighbor was still mobile or plowing, he'd be spending an extra $32,000 this year just on diesel fuel.
Dick Foell:
Wow. Frank, you got a selling point there, wow.
Frank Lessiter:
Exactly. And then you got less machinery. And it used to be, how did you fight the idea that if you no-till you're going to have to plow every four or five years?
Dick Foell:
Well yeah, that's probably true. The one thing that the herbicide, the particular herbicide now there's some that yes, that's part of it that you didn't need to plow because it was so fixed to the soil particle. But now they've added residual herbicides that yes, they better plow and disc and turn that under.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. But my philosophy always was the guy says, I think I'll have to plow in four or five years and I said, well go ahead, see what happens. But after four or five years most of them never plowed. They realized after they tried it they didn't have to. So one of the big things that happened that made no-till go is from one of your competitors Monsanto came out with Roundup, there were some limitations of what Paraquat could do that Roundup kind of helped move the no-till movement along, right?
Dick Foell:
Yes. And then we got together with Monsanto and Zeneca and all the other companies that were formed because of that, they switched over to the combination of the product, and also the speed of one versus the speed of the other became less important.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. Well one of the benefits of glyphosate was the translocation to the roots, which you didn't have with Paraquat.
Brian O'Connor:
We'll come back to Dick Foell and Frank Lessiter in a moment. Before we do so I'd like to thank our sponsor Verdesian for supporting today's podcast. At Verdesian Life Sciences we believe that supplying healthy water and soil for the next generation is just as important as supplying efficient nutrients for every crop farmers grow. For us, sustainability and profitability go hand in hand, that's why we call ourselves the nutrient use efficiency people. We have dedicated ourselves to providing prescriptive nutrient use efficiency solutions that improve plant uptake and reduce fertilizer losses, helping preserve the environment and make the most of your investment. Learn more at VLSCI.com, or talk to your ag realtor today about Verdesian products. Before we get back to the conversation, here's Frank Lessiter with a little known no-till farmer fact.
Frank Lessiter:
Well as we're talking today with Dick Foell about the history of no-till, I thought it would be interesting to go back and look at some things that we have done in the past. And one of the issues I looked at was in the September No-Till Farmer issue of 1980. And we kind of think about cover crops maybe being new but they're certainly not, they've been used for many decades by growers [inaudible 00:16:17]. And back in that issue we talked about Ralph Rasnick, who has fertilizer applied on his cornstalks in the fall, he has a custom applicator mix rye with the nutrients, and the Riner, Virginia farmer was applying 40 pounds per acre of nitrogen along with potash and phosphorus based on soil test results, and to work the [inaudible 00:16:38] fertilizer into the ground he ran a disc over 12 inch tall corn stubble. So anyone that thinks that cover crops are new in the last few years or last decade, we've been using them for many years. And in fact, when I was growing up on a farm and Michigan in the early 1950s my dad was seeding cover crops at that time.
Brian O'Connor:
And now we'll get back to the conversation.
Frank Lessiter:
What are some of the interesting stories you can recall from working with people?
Dick Foell:
Well the most difficult was I don't believe it, and then I believe it. You would tell them and explain, and they would think about it and give it usually a small acreage, and then they realize and converted over to every acre that they could because of the economics and time that was involved in the new no-till regime.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. Well they used to talk about the guy that was going to try it wasn't going to try it up by the highway, he was going to put it back in the back 40 some place so he didn't get ridiculed.
Dick Foell:
You got good memory, Frank, because that just happened a lot. Yeah, because of farm ugly.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. Do you come up with the farm act ugly slogan or somebody else or what?
Dick Foell:
No, I guess I'm credited with it but I think that as I recall a farmer's the one that actually should get credit for it.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah.
Dick Foell:
What Chicky? Oh, their wives.
Frank Lessiter:
There you go.
Dick Foell:
Listen to a woman. Well she was a big part of my life at that time and a lot of the meetings and stuff Chicky attended.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. No, I remember being at meetings where both of you were there.
Dick Foell:
Yep.
Frank Lessiter:
So what kept no-till from catching on faster in the early days?
Dick Foell:
The most difficult thing was of course getting the word out and the technology. And as you had mentioned, the universities were not behind it right off, and then we had some pioneers that saw the value in it and then started promoting it. And once the university system started promoting it then it went really bonkers.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. Well 2022 is a big year for everybody, it's the 60th anniversary of the first no-till on the Harry Young field in Herndon, Kentucky in Western Kentucky, it's the 50th anniversary year of our No-Till Farmer publication, and it's the 30th anniversary of our National No-Tillage Conference, so we just had our 30th one back in January. And in 30 years it's brought in as many as 1,400 farmers, and the least we ever had was about 700 farmers so we've done very well with this.
Dick Foell:
Yeah, I wanted to come but economically I had to choose not to make it. I had an invitation and everything, several of them.
Frank Lessiter:
Sure, sure.
Dick Foell:
But I didn't make it.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. Well we still haven't worked out all the problems with no-till, even right now with the Biden Administration they're finally figuring out a way that we can have crop insurance if you plant a cover crop and then put in corn or soybeans. I mean for several years here they wouldn't, they said the first crop is cover crops that's what we should insure and they wouldn't insure the corn or soybeans, well they finally figured out that's not the way to go but they've made some changes. And then Biden is right now USDA is big on trying to promote double cropping more soybeans so we can feed the world.
Dick Foell:
Well in one sense it makes sense if you can double crop, but no-till lends itself to double cropping too.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. Well that's it, and wheat or barley followed by soybeans. It was just interesting, one of our editors was saying yesterday that we had talked to a farmer I think in Iowa who had seeded a cereal rye cover crop last fall, and then he was going to put in corn or soybeans this spring. And normally he would go in and kill that cover crop either with chemicals or roll it or crimp it, well the soybeans came up okay, he would roll, or crimp it, or treat it with chemicals maybe a week after he planted his soybeans. Well the interesting thing that happened here is it really got wet and he couldn't go in there and either spray or crimp to cover the rye cover crop, so what's happening now the soybeans are coming fine but all of a sudden he's going to harvest this rye as, seed and either sell the seed to neighbors or use it as his own cover crop. So what he was going to terminate, because of the weather he's got a seed crop coming off there. So it's crazy what some of these guys are doing.
Dick Foell:
Can he still harvest the rye and the beans will come in?
Frank Lessiter:
Yep, yep. He's going to have a double crop in-
Dick Foell:
He lucked that there, yeah.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, he started out he thought he was going to have a cover crop in soybeans and now he's got a rye cash crop and soybean.
Dick Foell:
Oh, well that's great.
Frank Lessiter:
So you told me the other day that you've kind of got your garage set up as a no-till shrine?
Dick Foell:
Well I took one of my pictures down, I don't know who drew it of me with my coat on and all the little slogans then, it's sitting over here on the table. And all of the people that signed it that were involved in those days, I can't read all the signatures. But yes, and I've got in the backside of the garage, my ego, I put the pictures up as a memory.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. Well I think as far as no-till was found you could find nobody that wasn't more enthusiastic about it than you were.
Dick Foell:
Well I have to agree with you, I sure got carried away. But it had a lot to do with my livelihood too.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, right. Did you ever think it wasn't going to work?
Dick Foell:
No, because some of the experiment stations told me that it's the answer.
Frank Lessiter:
So let's go back to no-till cotton for a while, you said there was a crop that really fit no-till. Tell me why you were high on no-till cotton.
Dick Foell:
Well in the old days, of course they did fallow ground with cotton and they wanted crop off it. And the no-till enabled them to plant a spring crop and then come back with cotton, so they got to double crop which they weren't doing before.
Frank Lessiter:
Okay, so what crop would they put in ahead of cotton?
Dick Foell:
A lot of times here in the west it was a grain, alfalfa sometimes, not common with alfalfa more with grains, barley, wheat, oats. Alfalfa would come back even with a spray down, so it was basically grain. And then come in later June, July and plant the cotton and take it off in September and October.
Frank Lessiter:
Well that brings up another point, because back in the '70s and early days, we were no-tilling corn particularly into sod, we didn't start with a corn soybean rotation, it seemed to me that a lot of these guys were planting the sod. That pretty much true in the early days?
Dick Foell:
Yes, I think not necessarily sod too but just fallow ground. Yeah. And instead of having to come in a dis plow and really work it, they just sprayed off and planted into the fallow ground.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. Well one of the things I always remember at our first no-till conference in 1993, we had a speaker from South Dakota Dwayne Beck, and he got up and he said, "You guys in Ohio no-till to get rid of the water, and in South Dakota we no-till to keep every drop that falls on the ground." And there was truth in that.
Dick Foell:
Yes.
Frank Lessiter:
So what are you doing in retirement?
Dick Foell:
Well basically I'm 87 now, Frank, and I have a little community church over here that has a lake and a pond and 15 acres, and I'm enjoying the heck out of it. And I am spraying weeds, I do the banks of the pond or of the lake, and then I do the stream and the parking lot. And then I have a fallow where I planted some trees that I'm keeping sprayed off too. So I'm still involved from that standpoint but that's about the extent of it, now I'm calmed down.
Frank Lessiter:
Doing any traveling?
Dick Foell:
Yes, we just got back from Mexico, a month in Mexico. But we own property in Cabo, San Lucas and it's called club Cascadas, and we have a month that we own the villas and so we go down there. And the thing about it is we've been doing it for 30 years so we meet the old friends, it's home away from home.
Frank Lessiter:
Sure, sure.
Dick Foell:
And it's a big part of our life. And then we go over to Cayucos two times a year at the beach and that's about the extent, otherwise here I do have a son that's a school bus driver that lives with us and got a granddaughter and a grandson that live close by. I have 11 great grandchildren, five grandchildren, so we've got a lot of people in our lives.
Frank Lessiter:
Well we've got four kids, we've got 14 grandkids, but we don't have any great grandchildren yet. We're old enough to have it but we've only got one of our grandchildren married off. We're way behind you.
Dick Foell:
Yeah, you got more grandchildren.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah.
Dick Foell:
Well you've got a good family too, that's important.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. No, that's very important. And we try to go to Florida for a month in March at Sanibel Island and Fort Myers, so we get out.
Dick Foell:
And where's that, Florida?
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, yeah.
Dick Foell:
Yeah, your side of the world Florida's the key.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, right. So you worked a lot with John Bradley who was at the [inaudible 00:27:54] experiment station, he speaks very highly of you.
Dick Foell:
John was a champion and a good friend.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. Then he left and went to Monsanto, he worked on no-till cotton for quite a while.
Dick Foell:
Yeah, you're bringing up good names. Jerry Quinn, I'm trying to think of some of the others, Lynn Henderson. There was a whole bunch of them.
Frank Lessiter:
Yep. We're getting old.
Dick Foell:
Yeah. Well I don't know about you, I think you said something about it, but I do treadmill, bicycle, weights, and exercises every day, and diet. We have a minimal breakfast, salad for lunch, and then we have fruit for dinner and we're taking care of ourselves.
Frank Lessiter:
God, you'll live forever on that program.
Dick Foell:
And I'm 170 pounds, 5'11.5 if I stand up straight, and I really feel great too. 30 inch waist and I'm hanging in there, man.
Frank Lessiter:
Well you're making me feel bad because you're much better shape and condition than I am. But I do go to the gym a couple times a week.
Dick Foell:
Well that's what you were saying, yeah.
Frank Lessiter:
Try to walk everyday.
Dick Foell:
The thing about it, we had a gym just two blocks away, it was a little longer than that. And it closed and moved and that really kind of, we really missed it because even though it had the same things we have in the garage, you had people there and activities and things that we don't have now.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. Well it's interesting looking at no-till what we've done in the US, and then you look at what they've done in Western Canada, and Western Canada is way ahead of us on the percent of land that's no-till. They've been in dry line conditions, they've been big on wheat, and canola, and sunflowers, and other pulse crops, but no-till's kind of just an old fashioned idea to them.
Dick Foell:
Well you know, and that's the heart warming part of that memory is coming up with that concept really made a difference in agriculture. And then all the people that got on the bandwagon so enthusiastically really made life worthwhile.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, right. What have I missed talking to you about and reminiscing about with no-till?
Dick Foell:
Well it's great to hear your voice again, and I thank you for thinking of me and hopefully sometime we can get together.
Frank Lessiter:
We're getting lots of flack these days about glyphosate or Roundup, and there there's people who'd like to see us ban it. And I think it, and we got a serious thing going on right now with atrazine, I mean people are saying the EPA needs to rewrite the rules on atrazine, and atrazine has been a round since day one of no-till.
Dick Foell:
Yeah, in the early days that was the fellow competitor. And it caused the two problems because the atrazine was residual and the Paraquat was gone and bound by this soil. But yeah, it's a shame and I don't think the government and the organizations today understand agriculture like they did in the past.
Frank Lessiter:
Right, well there's no doubt about that. The USDA budget today is about 85% school lunch programs and nutrition.
Dick Foell:
Isn't that truth. Yeah, we got all the [inaudible 00:31:40].
Frank Lessiter:
There aren't many farmers left in Congress anymore. But going back to Roundup, if it did get cut back or reduced I think we would have to come back and start using more Paraquat or Gramoxone.
Dick Foell:
Yeah, well the thing about it is that Roundup's big business is homeowners now.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, and they're going to quit doing that though. Bayer is-
Dick Foell:
I've got one in my truck and one outside in the back with the little hand sprayer right on the can or the black bottle.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, yeah. Hey, I'm going to let you go. This was great, it's fascinating. I appreciate all you did over the years for no-till and you played a big part in what's going on today.
Dick Foell:
Well thank you so much, you made my year.
Brian O'Connor:
That was Frank Lessiter and Dick Foell talking about saving soil, toil, and oil. Before we wrap up today's episode here's Frank Lessiter one more time.
Frank Lessiter:
When we talk about increasing yields, particularly with corn, the question is how much farther we can go. We know we've had corn yields in contests of over 600 bushels per acre, but that's not what we're seeing across the country today. But regardless of that, we're going to see higher and higher yields, and one of the ways to do this is going to be with narrower rows. The Harry Stein family in Adele, Iowa's developing new genetics for growing corn in a 12x12 inch row pattern. And regardless of the crop, we're going to see narrower rows to take advantage of new genetics, improved weed control with earlier shading, and other improvements that will pump up yields. And Fred Below, a crop physiologist at the University of Illinois, says this is definitely going to be the trend in corn, we're going to see narrower rows, and we're probably going to see twin rows in an effort to push up our yields.
Brian O'Connor:
That concludes this episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast. Thanks to our sponsor Verdesian for helping to make the series possible. You can find more podcasts about no-till topics and strategies at No-TillFarmer.com/podcasts. That's No-TillFfarmer.com/podcast. If you have any feedback on today's episode, please feel free to email me B-O-C-O-N-N-O-R@LessiterMedia.com, or call me at 262-777-2413. And don't forget, Frank would love to answer your questions about no-till and the people and innovations that have made an impact on today's practices. So please email your questions to us at ListenerMail@No-TillFarmer.com that's ListenerMail@No-TillFarmer.com. If you haven't already, you can subscribe to this podcast to get an alert as soon as future episodes are released, find us wherever you listen to podcasts. For Frank in our entire staff here at No-Fill Farmer, I'm Brian O'Connor. Thanks for listening and farm ugly.
