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“I got to thinking, I said, "We can take those plow coulters off of the big plows and adapt them to the fertilizer bar in the front of the 7000 planter.” And that's what we ended up doing. We would reinforce that fertilizer bar, of course take the fertilizer openers off if it had it. And we would reinforce that with pretty heavy angle iron and end up with the same shape as the coulter bracket where it fits on the big plow.”
John Shipp
In this week’s “No-Till Influencers and Innovators” podcast, we take another look back at the early days of no-till in western Kentucky. However, this episode is different than most of the podcasts in this series as it features a former John Deere dealer and his memories of the rapid growth of no-till in the western Kentucky area.
John Shipp operated Shipp Implement Company at Russellville, Kentucky, in the 1970s and 1980s and was deeply involved with no-till, much to the chagrin of John Deere, who was not happy with the movement to no-till among the area’s growers … preferring to sell large horsepower tractors, moldboard plows and discs.
Now retired from the farm equipment business and living in Clarksville, Tennessee, Shipp shares in this podcast a few of his no-till memories and his battles the rigid rules John Deere had for dealers.
His battles with Deere started when he started modifying John Deere 7000 planters for no-till by adding more weight and plow coulters. Without these modifications, farmers had little chance of using this planter to no-till double-crop soybeans after wheat. To say John Deere was unhappy with what Shipp was doing is an understatement.
In the early 1980s, Shipp further irritated the John Deere finance folks in Moline by offering a never-before-tried used equipment bank-rolling plan. While John Deere Credit executives said he couldn’t do what he was doing, he continued the program that allowed area farmers to purchase used equipment. This was a time when life on the farm was tough, with low grain prices and high input costs keeping growers from investing in new farm machinery.
Later, Shipp followed with an idea for burning soybean oil as a replacement for diesel fuel in the all-green tractors being sold at the dealership, which led to further concerns with John Deere management about potential diesel tractor engine damage.
And then there’s the story of the grower who bought a Kinze no-till planter, but insisted that it be painted John Deere green to blend in with the rest of their equipment. A Kinze planter purchase that was suggested by the John Deere area manager.
Listen for the rest of the story as No-Till Farmer Editor Frank Lessiter interviews former Kentucky John Deere dealer John Shipp.
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 & 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. In this week's No-Till Influencers and Innovators podcast, we take another look back at the early days of no-till in Western Kentucky. However, this episode is different than most of the podcasts in this series, because it features a former John Deere dealer and his memories of the rapid growth of no-till in the Western Kentucky area.
Brian O'Connor:
John Shipp operated Shipp Implement Company in Russellville, Kentucky in the 1970s and 1980s, and was deeply involved with no-till, much to the chagrin of John Deere, who was not happy with the movement to no-till among the area's growers. Deere instead preferred to sell large horsepower tractors, moldboard plows and discs. Now retired from the farm equipment business and living in Clarksville, Tennessee, Shipp shares a few of his no-till memories and his battles with the rigid rules John Deere had for dealers. Join us as Frank Lessiter and John Shipp talk about Kentucky, no-till, and John Deere.
Frank Lessiter:
So how are you doing today?
John Shipp:
Oh, it's a beautiful day here. Almost 100.
Frank Lessiter:
Oh, God. A little warm.
John Shipp:
Threatened rain, but didn't. There's some moisture to the north and the east of us. It hasn't been too bad, but it's been pretty rough here for farmers, especially depending on corn. The no-till beans will stand drought better than corn will, and corn's got to have water at certain point. And most of the corn in this area, it's not a tremendously big thing in this immediate area, but you get up in Kentucky, Western Kentucky, well you talked about Wayne Hunt in his area, it's pretty important to have corn in that three crops in two years rotation that they do. How you doing?
Frank Lessiter:
Pretty good. Let's talk about no-till in the early days. When did you first hear about no-till, or when did you get involved with it?
John Shipp:
Well, I went into John Deere business. I lived in Elizabethtown, Kentucky and went to high school there, and thought eventually I would get the John Deere store in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. My father at one time owned half of it and the Chevrolet dealer owned the other half of it, but the way things turned out, it went another direction. And my friend, you've heard of James R. Cash Auction Company?
Frank Lessiter:
Sure.
John Shipp:
His brother, Norman Cash, was my John Deere territory manager, and he lived in Elizabethtown at that time, so I got to know him pretty well. And they had a store in Hopkinsville, a store at Bowling Green, couldn't get anybody to go to Russellville, and he talked me into going to Russellville. And we went there in the very early seventies, I believe '72 or '73. Prior to that, I had been watching the no-till and all the tractors and things like that, because that's about all I've ever done. And somewhere in the later seventies, I can't remember, I should have looked this up, but you probably know when no-till started coming along.
John Shipp:
And it just happened I read that article the other day that you had somewhere about the no-till culture, and I responded that we had to do something unusual to make it work on those John Deere 7000 planters, and that's what precipitated this call. Now, Wayne Hunt is a Christian County farmer near Herndon, and all my mother's people are from there. Matter of fact, my grandfather Crenshaw and Harry Young, their farms joined each other, and Allis Chalmers did a lot of experimental work on the no-till waffle coulter on Harry Young's farm.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. I've been there a number of times.
John Shipp:
So that'll bring us up to date. And of course, John Deere brought out the 7000 planter, the MaxEmerge planter, they called it, and it had a lot of superior designs on it, the metering, the max emerge units and everything like that, but we couldn't talk them into making it no-till. And we were selling those planters pretty good, and no-till the only way to go in our part of the country back then. The people that worked the ground up and planted the corn, they liked the 7000 planter like it was, but the double crop people had gotten to the place that they demanded an no-till culture to plant the beans after the wheat. Prior to that, they were taking an moldboard plow out there and plowing that wheat stubble up in the middle of July, and trying to get a crop of beans.
John Shipp:
And you can imagine a year like this, getting those beans to germinate, so no-till was the answer to it. And we were selling those planters to really good customers and really good farmers and everything like that, and they said we needed to make those things no-till, and John Deere just wouldn't listen to us at all. And we were still selling mortarboard plows back then, and I'd come in the morning and I'd walk past that line of moldboard plows, and I'd get that 7000 planter that was at the end of the row or something like that, and I got to thinking, I said, "We can take those plow coulters off of the big plows and adapt them to the fertilizer bar in the front of the 7000 planter," and that's what we ended up doing.
John Shipp:
We would reinforce that fertilizer bar, of course take the fertilizer openers off if it hadn't. We would reinforce that with pretty heavy angle iron and end up with the same shape as the coulter bracket, where it fits on the big plow. So it bolted on there with factory bolts, and we of course would use a cushion coulter. You could get one with a sheer bolt, or you could get one with a spring cushion, and some people wanted to try the plow coulter by itself, some people wanted a regular waffle blade put on it, but we were able to accommodate that and make all that work.
John Shipp:
And for the summertime planting, we put front weight brackets off of John Deere tractors, adapted those to this bar, one on each side, so you can hang weights on it to get it to go the ground. And to my knowledge, nobody ever tore up their planter. John Deere just died. He said, "That planter's not designed to do that." And I said, "They're going to buy something else if we don't get this done." And pretty soon word got out, people would come from other parts of the world and want to buy a kit. Sometimes we'd put together what we thought they needed, and of course, we didn't usually hear back from them. But reinforcing that fertilizer opener bar, and of course, it had straps that connected it to the mainframe. We would add some of those in there. We just didn't have any trouble, and it sold a lot of planters.
Frank Lessiter:
So before you did this, Allis Chalmers, did they dominate the planter market in that area, or not?
John Shipp:
It was a mixed bag. I really hadn't thought about it from that standpoint. Of course, we had an Oliver dealer then, we had an International Harvester dealer then, of course eventually the John Deere dealer was me, and Allis Chalmers, and they were all fairly successful, and far more successful than any of them are today. You know how that's gone.
Frank Lessiter:
Exactly.
John Shipp:
Now, they had a pretty decent planner, and that being able to no-till with it when not very many other outfits could do it, it was their ace in the hole. And most people in that area that were farming on any scale at all would double crop the soybeans behind the wheat, and it still was not in the class with the MaxEmerge planter for planting corn. Of course, that's what John Deere kept telling us, and we said, "Yeah, that's right, but we want to do other things."
Frank Lessiter:
So why was John Deere so slow? They just didn't want to get into the no-till market, they wanted to keep selling big tillage tools?
John Shipp:
I think it's a combination of things. At the top of the list, they just don't like people to tell them what to do.
Frank Lessiter:
That's still true today.
John Shipp:
Yes. Yes, that's bred in their heritage. Moving on up a few years, we had trouble with them because they wanted to get into the insurance business, and they did. And I can't fault them for wanting to diversify like that, but if you financed a John Deere piece of equipment, they would add the cost of their insurance and tell you they were giving it to them, and then they wouldn't pay the claims. But I guess they've been far more successful than I have, I shouldn't be trying to throw rocks at them. But anyhow, Allis Chalmers was not a fantastic planner. It was made up of two bars and tied together, and it was durable. And of course, I don't think they patented that waffle coulter. They may have, but most anybody could seem like they could use it.
John Shipp:
Well, we'd give our customer a choice if you wanted it. That semi waffle coulter that John Deere came out with where they had a couple inches was just like a plow coulter, straight, and then it had small waffles in a little closer. That was my favorite one. If you couldn't cut through stuff with it, you wasn't going do it at all, and that was a John Deere. I don't know whether they patent it or not, but that was where we got that blade was John Deere, and we'd have to go to the Allis Chalmers dealer to get the waffle blade at first. Some people, just once they got that on there, they'd just go on with the regular plow coulter. It was a little harder on the MaxEmerge units to do that than to have a little bit more tillage in there like the waffle bolt would make.
Frank Lessiter:
So what did Deere say to you when you were modifying these planters, stop doing it, or threaten you, or what?
John Shipp:
I don't remember. They didn't find out about it for a while. I think any big company like that is from the top down management. I'm sure yours is not that way, but they have goals, and they have markets and ratios and everything, and they start into whatever year they're in and they set aside this much money for warranty and they watch that really close. We never tried to warranty anything like that. We never had any trouble with it. Every once in a while, somebody would hit a rock. You get in Kentucky most anywhere, you can find a rock in Kentucky.
John Shipp:
And the cushion coulter that we were using was already designed to jump over that rock with the cushion part on it, so that added a lot to the durability of it. But we never sent a warranty claim in for something that we knew was not right, and I don't know other dealers that were doing that. Of course, eventually they redesigned that MaxEmerge unit and put the coulter on the front of it, which was really where it needs to be. Made ours look like it was a Sunday school thing. They just weren't ready to do that. I don't know where the management backed up on it, but we went four or five years selling planters, maybe longer than that. They used to have the 1240 and the 1260, and we never tried to do that. That was pretty light duty.
John Shipp:
But now, the MaxEmerge planter, the 7000 really brought us to the front, to where we were in the game, but we needed to substitute in the game when we put the no-till cultures on there.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, you go farther north, you get into Central Illinois or Central Iowa, Central Indiana, those 7,000 planters were pretty popular with no-tillers when they were doing full season beans and full season corn.
John Shipp:
Ye, yes. Ours were too, but the double crop and the beans behind the wheat is really what made us do that, because the regular planner wouldn't do a good job. It just didn't have the plates to slice to do it. Granted, the MaxEmerge unit was better than anything else out there then at that time.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, I can remember back in the seventies and eighties, we'd get these pictures all the time from farmers who were trying to get more weight on their planters so they could get them in the ground. You would see people with concrete blocks, you'd see people with bags of fertilizer on them. You'd see people with water containers, down pressure. We didn't know what down pressure was then, but that's what they were looking for, more weight to get it in the ground.
John Shipp:
Well, the other thing that some of our customers used, this fertilizer bar. If you got fertilizer for a MaxEmerge, which you got the fertilizer openers, and you could get a dry fertilizer hopper or you could get a liquid fertilizer hopper, and you could put a 7000, you could put a couple of tanks on there, I'd say they were 150 gallon tanks or something like that, and get all the down pressure you needed.
John Shipp:
But a lot of them, they wanted that tied to the toolbar, and that's what we did. We reinforced it, and we would take a front tractor weight bracket. Most everybody had front weights on their tractors, and we'd have to go buy some over them and hang those weights on there when they needed it, take it off when they didn't need it. And I don't remember putting the tanks on any, but we have. Some people may have already had a liquid fertilizer outfit and came with it, we'd just take the openers off and modify the bar, and put the coulters on there.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, the trouble with the fertilizer tanks, it's okay when you start out, but when they get empty, you've lost your down pressure.
John Shipp:
So true. So true. That's right. You have to have a water truck at the end of the field for it. How old are you?
Frank Lessiter:
I'm 82.
John Shipp:
82. Well, your son said that you beat me a little bit. I'll be 81 in September.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, I'll be 83 in October.
John Shipp:
You going to stay ahead of me, aren't you?
Frank Lessiter:
Right. I sometimes tell people I'm as old as dirt. You ended up running three John Deere dealerships?
John Shipp:
No, sir. I had one, and we were very successful. John Deere always broke up their area in by branches. We were in the Columbus branch, and were as far away from the Columbus branch. We were the second largest volume dealer in the Columbus branch. We never could pass the guys at Fishers, Indiana. They always had one or two really strong stores. That was the other thing, John Deere couldn't figure out how we were selling that much stuff in Kentucky. If it hadn't been for Norman Cash. it never would've worked six months, but he and I were friends and he trusted me. We talked about James R. You knew James R. had died?
Frank Lessiter:
Yes.
John Shipp:
The brother that was the auctioneer, and his son JR is continuing on with that. But Norman, of course, is retired, and I talk to him every once in a while. I believe he's ended up in Lexington. I think that his wife's people were there or something like that, but I don't think John Deere and I could have got along at all if it hadn't been for him.
Frank Lessiter:
Did it end up around Russellville, most of the farmers go to no-till and double cropping three crops in two years, or not?
John Shipp:
Yes, yes. If you look at a map, and look where I-65 goes north and south, there's a strip of land that runs across Southern Kentucky that's about 15 or 20 miles wide north to south, and it's about 10 or 12 miles north to south in Tennessee, and if you were in the east, it would start roughly at I-65. If you get much further east than that, you get into a lot of red clay and a lot of rocks. But this strip of land is a little miniature corn belt, and I didn't teach them how to farm, they knew how to farm for generations. That was and it still is a miniature corn belt. The only thing it lacked of being perfect, it was hard to find a place to irrigate. There wasn't a strong steam stream of water running close to it, and you had to go really deep to get a well that would force support irrigation. Not a whole lot of irrigation was done back then, and I'm serious too with tobacco, and there's not hardly any tobacco grown anymore.
Frank Lessiter:
So you live in Clarksville, Tennessee today?
John Shipp:
Yes. Yes. Hank Bormann, who was originally a John Deere guy, he got to be a territory manager for Kubota, and I worked with him someplace. I started to say at Agri-Power, but I don't think... Yeah, we had Kubota at Agri-Power. That's probably where I met him, Wayne Hunt's store, and I helped him get that started. And Wayne don't need any help, just we were close enough friends, he asked me to help him when he bought the Case company store when they went out of business there, and started in the farm equipment business. But anyhow, I was in Wakefield, Virginia, trying to help a guy that had a dealership in Wakefield, and one dealership over on the Eastern Shore. You talk about an interesting part of the country, you had to go under the Atlantic Ocean to get from Virginia Beach.
Frank Lessiter:
Right.
John Shipp:
You know where I'm talking about.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. The Delmarva Peninsula.
John Shipp:
That's right. That's right. And the interesting thing about Wakefield, you could sell peanut combines, cotton pickers, and combines all in the same place. They grew it all there. That was the first place in North America that they grew peanuts, I believe was. But anyhow, Hank Bormann called me and he said, "What are you doing?" I told him, and he said, "Can you come back to Kentucky and help me put Russellville on the map?" And I thought about it about 25 seconds, and I said, "Yes." And so we started a dealership from scratch in Russellville about 20, 22 years ago, something like that. It wasn't as strong and as big as the John Deere dealerships I've been involved with, but I put it back on the map for him.
John Shipp:
And about five years ago, I saw that Kubota was going the direction, John Deere. They wanted multiple locations. When I went in business as a Kubota dealer, they did not want multiple locations. And they had one in Murphysboro, Tennessee, I believe, had two or three stores, and they just couldn't keep up with them. They weren't prepared. But the more I dealt with them, the more they learned from John Deere how to do things, and then they hired people from John Deere. The Kubota people were not dumb, but they did that. And I had a chance to sell it to an individual that had already bought the Kubota place at Paris, Tennessee, and get out of it and step back. And they owned one in Nashville, in Paris, in Clarksville, and in White House Tennessee, which is north. And the last time I talked to them, they were shopping for more stores, but that family has some medical patents that has a good cash flow to them.
John Shipp:
They and some of their friends figured out how to put a cast inside of a bone. They put a tube in there, and then they put a trigger on it, and once it's in there and the bone is set, they pull that trigger and it becomes rigid. It's amazing, but they've got a good cash flow out of that, and they're very successful. I think the store here in Clarksville is the largest Kubota dealership in Tennessee, I think, the single store. I know that.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, a couple things happened with Deere after they finally decided they would support no-till when they did it, and then they came out with the John Deere 750 drill, which had a big impact. And then at the same time, rotary combines came out, and all of a sudden we were able to spread straw residue the full width of the combine, which no-till definitely needed, instead of having it in a pile or in a swathe. So were you involved with the 750 drills?
John Shipp:
Some. Most of the drilling was done after you took the corn off, and most everybody wanting to do some tillage had nothing to run the disc over to chop those stalks up, and we really didn't sell a lot of no-till drills. A lot of people, it wasn't something they needed to change immediately, like putting the beans after the wheat. But we sold some, and I don't remember how many or what percentage, or don't remember having any trouble modifying them any. I think they were set to do what they were doing.
Frank Lessiter:
You think rotary combines made a big difference, being able to spread the residue the full width?
John Shipp:
Sure, sure. Yeah. I had another interesting stint when Caterpillar developed the Challenger tractor, the rubber track tractor. Wayne Supply company, who is the only dealer in Kentucky, they were one of the initial Caterpillar dealers when caterpillar was developed 1913 or '23 or whatever it was, and I knew people there, and they hired me to put them in the farm equipment business. And I did that for about 10 or 15 years, and of course, Wayne Supply, the Wayne family finally ran out when I was working there. I knew Roy C. Wayne Senior and I knew the son, and I knew the son wasn't going to carry it on, but he had a sister Carrie, and she carried it on for a long time. But now they sold out to the guy that was a sales manager or his group about five years ago, something like that, and it carries his name. I can't remember what it is.
John Shipp:
But that was interesting, putting people in the Caterpillar tractor business, and things like that. And a lot of those same customers that I had with John Deere and things like that, I went right back to them with them, and they just gave me free rein. I'd haul them around and demonstrate them and things like that, and it was kind of radical at that time. But the combine is what put me onto this. The combine that they were selling at that time, or we were selling at that time, was superior to anything else out there. I remember going to the Farm Machinery Show that year or the Farm Progress Show that year, where they line up the combines and run them so far. They had the guy there that was flagging them off, and he'd let the red combine of the green combine or whatever get through before he'd let the other combine come through.
John Shipp:
And I remember he stood there like that, and the John Deere combine was almost halfway through and the guy with the Cat combine, he couldn't wait, and he took off and passed him, and I'd never seen that happen at that particular show before. And I guess he got scolded pretty much. Of course, you know all those farmers ran out there and just knew there was going to be a big pile of corn out there, and some of them couldn't find any. That was a superior combine. And I don't remember exactly the configuration of the rotors, but it was not a cylinder combine. Cylinder combine was fast going by the wayside by then.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, the thing I remember about the Cat Challenger tractors, and we're on our 31st year of holding the National No-Tillage Conference, we'll get 1,000 no-tillers in for meeting once a year, but these no-tillers were buying these Cat Challenger tractors like crazy. And I couldn't figure out for a long time why they were doing it, but I finally figured out these progressive no-tillers are innovators. They're more than willing to try some new idea, and they made the Challengers work for them. There were a lot of Cat Challengers got sold to no-tillers that let them pull bigger, wider equipment and sprayers, but the main thing is-
John Shipp:
Got the compaction some, too.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, absolutely. But the reason they tried it, they were just innovators, and they were willing to try something and they'd made enough money off no-till that they could invest in something like that.
John Shipp:
Yes. Yes. The tractors weren't perfect. I'm a purist, I guess I might say. I'd get disappointed every time something happened, thinking that Caterpillars should be perfect, but they're like any other company. And they farmed out a lot of that tractor. The main part of it was made in I can't think of where that plant is, that was building the big versatile tractors. Manitoba, Canada.
Frank Lessiter:
Oh yeah. Yeah. Winnipeg.
John Shipp:
Winnipeg, Winnipeg. But it had a Cat engine in it, which that everybody smiled, they know they had a Caterpillar then. It would pretty well sell itself. I could call up whatever store, Wayne had several stores scattered over the country and over Kentucky, and I'd say I needed whatever number it was sent to this guy's farm, and they'd load it up and bring it and I'd meet it there the next morning, and demonstrate it. And about half, maybe close to half of the demonstrations I made, we sold the thing. We sold the fire out of them. We watched the equipment. By then, I had learned that was the downfall of most tractor places, was the used equipment. Your son made a comment on our email that we exchanged back and forth that Wayne Hunt had said that I had an unusual way or something of dealing with used equipment, and I was going to ask him that if he was on the phone today, but I don't know what Wayne was talking about. Did he tell you my relation with Wayne Hunt?
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, he did, and it sounded like it was a very favorable one with the two of you.
John Shipp:
Oh yeah. Yeah. Wayne's uncle raised him. I don't know what happened to his father, but his uncle and one of my uncles in Christian County, Kentucky lived across the field from each other, so I knew Wayne for a long time. And like I said, he developed a very successful feed, seed and fertilizer and chemicals operation with Agri-Chem-
Frank Lessiter:
Oh yeah. I remember them.
John Shipp:
But he decided to get into the farm equipment business, and he called me one night and he said, "If I buy that Case Company store there," that was just south of Hopkinsville where Case Power & Equipment used to be when International went out of business, so to speak, he said, "Will you come up here and run it for me?" And I talked to him about five or 10 minutes and I finally said yes. And so I have to take a little bit of credit of putting Wayne in the farm equipment business, even though I taught him a lot of things he shouldn't do. He already knew how to do things.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, he's a... Go ahead, go ahead.
John Shipp:
I was going to say, I can't keep up with how many stores he's got. It's in the twenties or so, isn't it?
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah, probably. I don't really know, but he's a big-time farmer too, with his 10,000 acres or so, right?
John Shipp:
Yes. Yes. Of course, his uncle had a normal sized farm for that part of the country. It wasn't anything close to that, but what really got him in the farming business, the Mormon Church bought the largest tract of land. There were three eccentric brothers, the [Body 00:29:34] brothers, that died out and didn't have any family or anything like that, and they auctioned that farm off. And I can't remember the number of acres in it, but it was enormous, and it was right down the road from where Wayne lived. And so the Mormon Church bought it, and I never thought about it, and they said no, they believe in being sustainable. They might have to grow food on it for their people sometime. And Wayne got in with them and he leased that farm from them.
John Shipp:
It was 3,000 acres I believe, something like that. I don't want to make it sound bigger, but it was the largest tract of land that you could grow crop and farm in that part of the world. And of course, when he got that lease, he came over and sat down with me in my store in Russellville, and he said, "I need a this, a this, a this, and a this." He said, "How would you do it?" And I said, "We'd put it on a three year lease." John Deere was leasing at that time. And I said, "At the end of it, if you want to buy it and go on. If you don't want release your farm, you can just leave it there and they'll come pick it up. And we sold him quite a bit of stuff that way, and he didn't let any of it go back, I don't think, because he continued to farm that.
John Shipp:
And I think probably he and some partners probably own all that now. I'm not close enough to Wayne to keep up with it, but he gets a full day in every day. He don't stop and dilly dally around. He's always been that way, and you have to admire him because he didn't inherit anything from his daddy.
Brian O'Connor:
We'll come back to John Shipp 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 improving 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. Before we get back to the conversation, here's Frank Lessiter with a little known no-till farmer fact.
Frank Lessiter:
Since we've been looking back at the no-till history with John during this podcast, I thought we'd go back to the first National No-Tillage Conference, which was held in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1993, and we had 814 attendees and 45 speakers at that event over three days. At that time, there were about 32 million acres of no-till reported in the United States, which was a 60% increase from 1991. Today that number stands at about 110 million acres, so we've really made progress over the past 50 years or so.
Brian O'Connor:
Now back to John and Frank.
Frank Lessiter:
A couple minutes ago, you mentioned that used equipment is a thorn in the side of dealers, and right now, used equipment prices are high. A lot of farmers can't get new equipment, they'd like to trade their planters or something. Our son Michael told me you got into it with John Deere about financing used equipment, right?
John Shipp:
Well, not exactly. They would finance used equipment. They were very conservative, but what we did that they did not like, I can't remember the year, it was sometime in the eighties. I could see the used equipment back up existing because it was existing in our location, so I sat down with Norman Cash and I told him, I said, "I want to have a dealership auction," which was nothing new, but I said, "I'm going to offer John Deere credit." And he didn't say anything, and I didn't ask John Deere. And so time came to print the advertising of that. They end up with a flyer, some dealer up there took a flyer into Columbus and said, "How can they do that? How can they do that?"
John Shipp:
So they just ran all over this, and sent their credit manager down and said, "You can't do this." And I said, "Whoa, stop there. Why can't I do this?" And he didn't have a reason. And we set up two offices and two people taking credit applications, and of course, nobody took anything home that day. We delivered it for them and everything like that, and got their credit approved, it was just a way to get customers together and bid against each other in a slow market for used equipment, but they were going to stop us. There again, I think if it hadn't have been for James R., that was another auction that put James R. on the map. It was a tremendous auction. We had a lot of combines, and customers brought stuff in and everything.
John Shipp:
It was almost a two day auction auction that lasted 18 hours, and there was no hanky panky anything like that. But like I say, John Deere, they always want to tell you what you can and what you can't do. There's a lot of dealer auctions out there now, and there has been since then, and I don't know whether they offer financing or not. Nobody ever called me up and ask me how it worked. That was my idea, to get bids together and they didn't have to write a check that day.
Frank Lessiter:
So basically, Deere was saying they only wanted to finance new equipment?
John Shipp:
No. No, they would finance. We had some kind of a book, I forgot what they called it. They'd finance 50, 60% of that, depending on the customer. Nothing was delivered. Nobody loaded their stuff up and hauled it away and never made any payments or anything like that. I told them I was going to do it, and they told me I couldn't, and I went on and did it. That's what bothered them. And we did sales like that afterwards too. Anyhow, I could see the buildup of used equipment, and I've seen the time that used equipment was hot to sell like it is right now. Almost everything, you can't hardly make a mistake right now.
Frank Lessiter:
Right. Well, the thing is, today used equipment is so high price that some people say, "Well, I might as well buy something new," but the only problem for that is you can't get the new.
John Shipp:
That's right. That's right. We were in that situation when I went into John Deere business in the early seventies. Another ironic thing, there's a Kubota dealer today in Crossville, Tennessee, and I used to buy new 4430s and 4230s and so forth from him, and when it got tight with Kubota, we would buy Kubotas from him and the Kubota dealership. Of course, the father is gone and the son's still got the dealership, and it's a Kubota dealership, but he used to have a John Deere dealership there. Ralph Padgett was his name. He's been dead quite a while.
Frank Lessiter:
Another one that Michael told me you were a thorn in the side with Deere was you were looking at burning soybean oil in diesel engines. Tell me about that.
John Shipp:
Well, we had a lot of good customers, a lot of good friends and everything like that, and one day, I guess it would've been '79 or '80, I sent your son a page out of Progressive Farmer, which I think was your magazine at that time-
Frank Lessiter:
No, I got it right in front of me. April 1980.
John Shipp:
I think that's right. But anyhow, these two customers, they were both farmers, but they didn't farm at heart. One of them was an aeronautical engineer that had retired and farmed, and the other one, his specialty was selling grain. They were not what you'd call dirt farmers, and they came my store one day and sat down in my office and they said, "We think we should be burning soybean oil in a diesel engine." And when I got up out of the floor laughing at them, they said, "No, it'll work." And so we went to lunch that day, I still was skeptical, and on the way back, we stopped at a little Minute Mart and I got a jar of Wesson Oil, and our shop had steel tops on the benches.
John Shipp:
I wadded up some paper, wetted it with the Wesson Oil, lit it and it burned just like diesel fuel. We went from that to that fall at the National Soybean Convention in New Orleans, we hauled a John Deere 2440 down there and ran it on soybean oil in front of the hotel. I don't know anybody ever did a story on that, but I was very skeptical, and I didn't want any to promote anything that was going to damage the tractors. And we ran into a few problems. Of course, its viscosity is heavier than diesel, and the thing that really slowed us down, its gel point is lot higher than diesel. Number two, diesel is highest BTU per pound rating of any portable fuel that we have, and that's why everybody uses diesel, number two. But number two was gel before number one. Number one's considered kerosene, so we encountered that.
John Shipp:
But somewhere along the line, we got enough publicity that the Northern Regional Research center in Peoria, Illinois invited us to come there and present our alternate fuel, to tell people about it. There was several people there, some of them had different things, but that was our thing to do. I got to know the guy in charge of it, and I asked him about the gel point and he said, "Well, you need to mix ethanol with it." I said, "Hell, it won't mix." Well, about two months later, he sent me a jug that had an emulsion process, he called it, and he made the ethanol and the soybean oil mix, and that's basically what biodiesel is today. And the other thing that comes around is when you add ethanol to it, it burns cleaner than when it's not in there. It's an enhancer, they call it.
John Shipp:
Anyhow, we started that. We didn't have any idea what we were doing, but we had nerve enough to run right out there and do it, which it shows that in that piece of paper that I sent your son. I'm sure one of your guys came there and did a story on that, but all the TV stations around, it really made the news, and most all the farm magazines came and did stories on it. For some reason or another, I kept that Progressive Farmer over there about that. I don't think John Deere ever came right out and said, "You shouldn't be doing that." I think they were foresighted enough and knew something was going to have to change some time, and they were kind of glad to be in on it a little bit, but they didn't send somebody down and said, "You better quit doing that or all your kids will be born naked," or something like that. You know how they are. And I don't think they were negative about it. I think they were scared of me again for doing something like that. It took a long time, but it's worked out to be pretty good.
Frank Lessiter:
So have you got people in your area running biodiesel?
John Shipp:
Not a lot, and honestly, I can't tell you the ratios or anything like that, and I don't know the cost. It used to be that special oil was quite a bit higher than number two diesel and didn't produce quite as many BTUs per pound, so it wasn't. But I think the day will come that it'd be hard to buy diesel without an additive in it like soybean oil or the ethanol. You knew they had that big ethanol plant in Hopkinsville, didn't you?
Frank Lessiter:
Sure. Right.
John Shipp:
We was talking about Wayne. He was really in to get that done. I know we talked about it a lot, and I'm not sure it would be there if it wasn't for him push to get that done. And it's meant a lot to that community and jobs, of course, put ethanol right out in the front. Every time he'd run into a stump, he'd call me and we'd talk about it. And he called me one day and he said, "We've got a lot of service stations that want put ethanol in, but the oil companies won't let them." And I said, "What do you mean they won't let them?" He said, "No. They own the tanks and the fuel is in it. They're not going to let us put ethanol in them." I think they finally got past that, but he was very instrumental about getting that done and pushing it through.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, going back to these soil oil test, you did quite a bit on this. I think you had a John Deere 4630, this article says. You put it on a dynameter and it did pretty well, right?
John Shipp:
Yeah. Of course, that's another thing John Deere didn't like about me. If a fellow needed more horsepower, we knew how to give it to him, and that's very easy on those Bosch pumps, a little harder on the RoosaMasters on the older tractors, but I learned to do that. Nobody taught me to do that. We were selling 4020s out of the store at John Deere in [inaudible 00:43:50], and the power shift. Everybody wanted a power shift, and about half of them wouldn't pull themselves in eighth gear. And I went back out to the store one Sunday afternoon, and I had a brand new 4020, and I took that pump off and very carefully took that thing apart. Figured out how it worked, where you adjusted it, because John Deere wouldn't send you a manual if you didn't have a test stand, and figured that out.
John Shipp:
And we had people come from everywhere. They said, "They tell me you can make a 4020 smoke." And of course, the inline Bosch pumps were a lot easier. You just take a cap off the back, and there was a set screw in there you could change to do that. But that was another thing that they didn't like me doing. I don't know if any of them had ever ruined an engine. It probably shortened the life of it some, but it got what the customer wanted, and we could keep up with those other guys, the Internationals. We had a hard time keeping up with the 1206s and the 1456s and things like that with what John Deere had. John Deeres were nice tractors, had great cabs. International forgot to put a good cab on those tractors when they were building them, but they had a hell of a engine. But it let us keep up with them, to be able to change the fuel delivery on those tractors. What's next?
Frank Lessiter:
Why didn't the soy oil catch on?
John Shipp:
Nobody picked it up. See, everything had to go through the oil distributors, just like in our town there in Russellville, there was an oil distributor that had a service station out front. Of course, sooner or later, and I didn't keep up with that much after of got out of the big farm business and just was fooling with Kubotas, sooner or later, I think there was pressure from the groups that wanted to clean the air up. Of course, it's coming home to all of us about that, and I think they were forced to do that. The engine manufacturers and companies, I think they were forced to start putting additives in there, and it was unnatural to do that. And I think, like I say, the soy diesel has got some ethanol in it, which makes it burn cleaner, and it's a little thinner, doesn't gel as quick and all those things like that.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, looking at this Progressive Farmer article from 1980, they've got some figures in here. A gallon of diesel is $1 per gallon, and soy oil is $1.60, so that's changed a little since then. I think we've got diesel fuel that's $5 or $6 a gallon now, so farmers are looking for ways to cut their fuel costs. I just did an article in our newsletter, and the average acreage of our readers is 13,00 acres, and if you were no-tilling versus conventional tilling, the conventional tilling neighbor would be spending $32,000 more per year on diesel fuel than the no-tiller, so a heck of a difference.
John Shipp:
It is. It is. The cost of the diesel fuel, the soybean oil, the steak you buy at the grocery, the tires you put on your car, my theory is the monopolies have taken over our country. And I go back to what Wayne Hunt said about when they were trying to get ethanol in those service stations, they owned the tanks and they owned the fuel that's in it, and they're not going to let you do other things like that. They blame everybody.
John Shipp:
The public blames everybody, whether he's a Republican or Democrat in there, for high fuel costs and high this and high that, but we won't get that straightened out until we start breaking up the monopolies. If you're in a business, don't matter if you've got one store or 25, if you don't have any competition, you can charge whatever you want to. And that's an exaggeration of what's going on, but it's gotten worse in the last five, six, eight years or something like that.
Frank Lessiter:
So we've been talking about 50 minutes. You got any more thoughts on no-till that I ought to be talking to you about?
John Shipp:
Not that I think of. I forget things. I forget things pretty easy.
Frank Lessiter:
Well, so do I.
John Shipp:
I've got a brother that's 10 years older than I am, still is, he's in his nineties, and he was a proctologist. He was a surgeon that did a tremendous amount of surgery in Louisville, Kentucky, and had to quit. I think he'd still be doing it, but he has memory loss, and I'm just 10 years behind him. I can remember a lot of this stuff that happened years ago, but I can see my mind fading. And I know there's a lot of stuff up there that I can't get out right now, and never will be able to do.
Frank Lessiter:
One of the things that happened when I would come down, when I first went down the Christian County and around Hopkinsville, on double cropping, there were a lot of people that were double cropping barley with soybeans, because the barley could be harvested earlier and get a longer growing season for the soybeans. But barley went by the wayside down there, didn't it? Was it too cheap to sell, or what?
John Shipp:
Well, the there's two sides to that story. The seed barley was cheaper than the seed wheat, so it didn't even out, but the market for barley is just nothing. And back then, of course, if you had 1,000 acres, you had a tremendous amount, and most of those guys that were farming that track of land got five times that much, and they look more at those costs like that. But it does let you get the next crop in earlier. and it comes off a little earlier and it costs a little less to grow, but it's not as good on the selling end of it. And I don't know what they do with barley. I guess it goes into an animal feed of some kind.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. And there's some micro breweries, it's got a decent market for barley, but it's not huge.
John Shipp:
No. That's a bottle at a time.
Frank Lessiter:
There you go. Right.
John Shipp:
But they were planting more barley. People from other parts of the country are going, "Why in the world are you doing barley?" And we were a little bit unique on that. And I would assume you're correct, and they've gone back to wheat because the other cost didn't get any better, the machinery cost and the labor cost and all like that, so dealing with a higher price product maybe gives them a little more profit that way, because the fixed costs are the same.
Frank Lessiter:
What years did you get out of your John Deere dealership?
John Shipp:
At the end of the eighties. We went around and around and around with them. They made us sign a binding arbitration agreement back then, which meant the contract that they gave us was not worth the paper it was written on. And when we'd get into a squabble with them, they were always out. They knew what they were going to do because it got where couldn't get along at all, and they came in one day and shut us down. We were the first Kinze dealer out of the corn belt, and we had a customer that was bigger than life. And he had the first repowered tractor that Kinze made that he put a 318 Detroit engine in it. He bought a 4520 and had a 318 Detroit engine put in it at Kinze's place. Kinze was already fooling around with smaller engine swaps, so he insisted that we go on and be a Kinze dealer, and we got to be selling a lot of Kinze stuff. We sure did, and he was really good to us, and the sharpest guy that you ever would find to talk to. You've probably talked to him.
Frank Lessiter:
Oh yeah. Right.
John Shipp:
Yeah. I had some stories I was going to tell you about that, but our time may be running out.
Frank Lessiter:
Yeah. I think it is.
John Shipp:
I'll tell you the funniest one was John Deere didn't like it, and Norman Cash came in one day and I had laid on my desk, Kinze has send me a flyer on his double bar planter, and I just laid it down and didn't even look at it. Norman came in and he walked by, and he picked that up and he said, "What are you doing with this right here?" I didn't even know what he was talking about. I said, "Kinze sent that to me." Well, about eight o'clock that night, Norman called me. He said, "Can you get one of those double bar planters?" And I said, "I think I can." I said, "I think I can call John and he'll build you one. How you want it." They have a farming operation, the Cash family does, in the Fancy Farm area, and he said, "That's just what my brother's been looking for."
John Shipp:
Well, of course, by that time, John Deere and Kinze had gone through not use the green paint lawyer, and so I called Norman. I said, "This is how much it is," and I said, "I ain't got time to go after it." I says, "You all got trucks. You can go up to Kinze and load your planter on that truck." And so they went up there and picked it up, and they paid Kinze and brought it back to Fancy Farm. Of course, they unloaded it and set it up, and they looked at it, "We don't want that damn blue planter here in this John Deere." So they throw it back down and painted it green with tons green paint, and Kinze called me one day and he said, "What in the hell are you doing down there?" And I said, "I don't know what you're talking about. I had never seen the plant. Never had seen it yet." There was a big stink raised up over that, but that family was all John Deere, and they didn't want to go out there with a planter painted blue.
Brian O'Connor:
That was Frank Lessiter and John Shipp talking about Kentucky no-till and early struggles with John Deere. Before we wrap up today's episode, here's Frank Lessiter one more time.
Frank Lessiter:
Someone asked me recently, when was the first time that we talked about strip tillage in our no-till farmer publication. Well, I'm not sure, but it was sometime in the later eighties or early nineties. But I do know at the very first National No-Tillage Conference in 1993, we had a presentation by Cliff Roberts of Kentland, Indiana, and he'd already been strip tilling for a half dozen years, and he indicated he had done it all wrong the first three years, but he was onto a better system then. He was building strips in the fall and leaving a mound of soil in the roll area that remains five to seven degrees warmer than this rounded soil, so we've come a long ways in the past 30 years with strip tilling.
Brian O'Connor:
That's it for this episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators podcast. Thanks to our sponsor, Verdesian, for helping to make this series possible. You can find more podcasts about no-till topics and strategies at no-tillfarmer.com/podcasts. That's no, hyphen, tillfarmer.com/podcasts. If you have any feedback on today's episode, please feel free to email me at boconnor@tlessitermedia.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 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 and our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm Brian O'Connor. Thanks for listening, and farm ugly.
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