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“One of the biggest things I learned in 2021 was we were so dry early. In our area, typically we have too much water in May, and it delays us from planting. I’ve never seen a spring as dry as what we had last year. To the tune where we had winter wheat fields die over Memorial Day weekend.”
-Steve Wilkens
Steve Wilkens farms about 1,000 acres of Wisconsin ground his family has worked since the 1850’s. While the spring he describes in the above quote might seem almost apocalyptic, he turned it around. In 2021, Wilkens recorded a yield of 315.4 bushels per acre, enough to claim second place in the Wisconsin No-Till Non-Irrigated category for the National Corn Grower’s Association Corn Yield Contest.
Wilkens, who works for Syngenta, used a corn hybrid he recognized as part of his non-farming employment to break the 300 bushels per acre barrier. He uses a dated planter and a 2x2 fertilizer configuration to boost his production.
Wilkens’s story is one of several found in the pages of a new special report “No-Till Corn: Pushing the Boundaries of Yield Potential” issued by No-Till Farmer in October, and included as an insert in the October edition of the magazine, which profiles high-performance no-tillers in the National Corn Growers Association Annual Yield Contest.
Wilkens sat down with No-Till Farmer's managing editor, Michaela Paukner, to talk about his approach, and how he overcame the arid 2021 spring to accomplish high returns.
P.S. If you’ve enjoyed this week’s discussion with Steve Wilkens, be sure to check out No-Till Farmer’s newest No-Till Management Report, No-Till Corn: Pushing the Boundaries. This special report offers tips and guidance from growers at or near the height of their talents. Learn what challenges they face, from managing equipment to self-control, and find advice and valuable information to help you reach the same level of success that they have. Visit No-TillFarmer.com.com/corn to learn more and purchase your copy today for just $15.95.
No-Till Farmer podcast series is brought to you by SOURCE®️ by Sound Agriculture.
Welcome to a better SOURCE of fertilizer. SOURCE from Sound Agriculture unlocks more of the nutrients already in your fields, so you can add less fertilizer while getting the yield you’re counting on. By activating soil microbes, SOURCE provides more of the existing nitrogen and phosphorus to your crops. It’s such a solid backup plan, you’ll probably find yourself wondering why SOURCE wasn’t the plan all along. Learn more at www.sound.ag.
Full Transcript
Brian O'Connor:
Welcome to the No-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Sound Agriculture. I'm lead content editor, Brian O'Connor. On the podcast this week we're speaking to Steve Wilkins, who finished second in Wisconsin for the National Corn Growers Association Annual Yield Contest in the no-till non-irrigated category. Wilkins was one of several growers profiled in the No-Till Farmer Special Report, No-till Corn: Pushing the Boundaries of Yield Potential. It's available on our website. Lessiter Media digital content editor, Michaela Paukner, discussed Wilkins approach to nutrient management, planning, and more.
Steve Wilkins:
I am from the Southern Sheboygan County, Wisconsin area. We farm kind of in a three county area of Sheboygan, Washington, Ozaukee, where it all comes together, and we've kind of been in this area since the 1850s, so quite a few years, and got a couple of farms here, a couple of farms there, but that's kind of we've always had livestock on the farm, and we were a dairy farm for a very long time. And about 10 years ago, the cows left the operation, and then we did just a little bit more on the row crop side of things, but my parents have always enjoyed the animals. I've got an older brother who really enjoys machinery. My sister is into animals, primarily like horses and veterinary medicine, and I've always kind of taken to the row crop side of things. So it's just growing things as of interest to me, and I really enjoy it.
Michaela Paukner:
And how many acres are you farming and is it all no-till?
Steve Wilkins:
Yeah, so I farm with my dad, and we do a few things for some neighbors here and there. So all in, we're just a little under 1,000 acres, which is it's enough for me, because I have a full-time job off the farm that I really enjoy, and my parents are getting a little bit older, so it's enough, and we primarily are all no-till. We're still transitioning a few fields, but we've got some plans in place to get those kind of taken care of and some improvements, and field tile, and drainage, and stuff put in to get that to a better state. Yeah, for the most part, we do no-till just about everything, and we've had some fields that I think they might be going on 20, 25 years now that have been no-till, and they're pretty highly productive pieces of ground, and we do really well on them.
Michaela Paukner:
Great. And that's a great segue into what we're talking about today, which is your win in the 2021 National Corn Yield Contest. You placed second in Class D, no-till, non irrigated in Wisconsin with a yield of 315.3779 bushels, a great yield, as you said on that great ground that you're getting those high numbers. So for this specific plot, can you walk me through what hybrid you planted, your planting population, and then any details about planting to start?
Steve Wilkins:
Sure. So the hybrid that I used was 102 day hybrid from Golden Harvest, and I work for Syngenta, the farm that's one of the brands that we represent and I work with, so I've been planting the hybrid for a handful of years, and I always really liked it. It had really good agronomics and a very good top end yield, so I knew it had potential to really reach a higher yield level. And if I go back even before last year into 2020, I thought we had a better yield, but we had early frost that clipped us and cut our growing season about two weeks short, otherwise we maybe might have been talking a year earlier. So I knew coming off of 2020 I could do something really good with that product, and it just so happened that last year we didn't have that early frost. The stars kind of aligned, and we were able to get a really good yield check out of it.
So I guess you start with genetics when you look at high yield. You never want to limit yourself, and it's really important that you understand what you can do from a top end yield potential, so that's number one. The second one to me is I'm very particular about planting date and emergence. I think so much yield is made or lost at the time of planting. So I'm willing to wait a few extra days if I have to to make sure that the emergence is as uniform and as consistent as possible, and some years that happens. Some years it doesn't. We do live and we're subjected to all the challenges of the weather, but I like the soils to be a little bit warmer.
This is the third year in a row I think I had all of my soybeans planted before I put a kernel of corn in the ground, just to make sure that everything is as realistically good as possible. So emergence is key. Ideally, I want everything up out of the ground within a 12 hour time period. Certainly, I want it out within 24, and if that doesn't happen, I can still raise a good corn crop, but it's probably not going to be in that realm of, I would say, record type of yield. Okay? So a lot of focus on that, and I guess after I look at that, it all goes back to fertility for me. I don't necessarily put on what I would say is excessive amounts of fertilizer, but what I try to make sure is that everything goes into the root zone. Every nutrient that I apply is probably within an inch or two of the base of the plant at the root zone, so it can take it up, and there's good interceptions, and that really helps if you get into dry stretches or whatnot.
I consider myself a soil conservationist, but I love the concept of feeding the plant, maybe over feeding the soil when you're going for top end yield. So nutrients are expensive. You don't want to waste anything, and I want everything possible in that root zone for the plant to take up.
Michaela Paukner:
So talking about the nutrients, what did you apply to that high yielding plot, and at what rates, and when were you doing that?
Steve Wilkins:
Sure. So one of the things that my dad did a couple years ago is he kind of retro fitted our planter, and we actually have older equipment. So do I like new equipment? Absolutely, but I think people can actually raise a really good crop even if they don't have the latest and greatest iron on the farm. So we've got a Kinze 3000 corn planter, and it used to be an interplant, and we took the interplants off of it, and we put on liquid fertilizer capability. So the planter we can put on in-furrow and we can put on liquid, and we can put on dry, and we use all three of those. So when that planter goes across the field, we've got a lot of stuff going on. It is time consuming, but I certainly think it pays dividends when you look at the outcome at the end of the year.
So on a typical pass on the planter, I'll be putting down about 150 pounds of a Mosaic S10 in a two by two type fashion. And we do aim for two by two, not like a two [inaudible 00:07:50], and we'll also put down about 150 pounds of a Mosaic's Aspire as well. So we've got about 300 pounds of dry product going on in that two by two type of fashion. And then I'll run about 20 to maybe 25 gallon an acre of a liquid nitrogen mix where I'll throw in it'll be about a 28-0-0-5, and we dribble that out the back. I'd prefer to get it in the ground, but it just doesn't quite work that way on our planter, and then I start to play with other nutrients as well.
So into that mix, I'll put in potassium acetate. I'll run a couple of gallons of that per acre. I'll throw in a quart of zinc, a quart of manganese, a quart of boron as well, so that all goes into kind of my liquid solution. And then in-furrow we run about five gallons of the mix of some acids, some humic acids, some sugars, humate, and then I also run a product by NACHURS called imPulse as well. And then I'll cut that with about two to three gallons of water. So all in, we're putting about eight gallons in a furrow. Something new that I did last year as well is I added the product Xyway onto the planter. I didn't put it in-furrow. I ran it out the back of my nitrogen solution. In some of our heavier soils, we really struggle with fusarium crown rot, and we didn't have that problem last year in any of the acres that we put that product down on. So I certainly think that was a big help in keeping the plant healthier longer, keeping that root system clean, and helping the tail end the grain fill.
Michaela Paukner:
And how are you deciding what you're putting into that mix of nutrients?
Steve Wilkins:
Trial and error. So I've been working on stuff for a long time. I traditionally, I'll soil sample almost every single year to have a good idea of where I'm at. I'll tissue sample a lot of stuff as well, and this past year or two, I've started to take a lot of sap samples within the plant. So I really try to monitor nutrient uptake, nutrient levels, and to have a basic understanding of where my hybrids are on the farm per the yields that I'm getting out of it. And at first, it's a lot of data, and I probably didn't quite know what to make of all of it, but after a few years, I can start to understand that if I'm tracking at certain levels, certain yield goals now I think are in reach. Okay? So I would say it's an inexact science. I'm always interested in talking with people who might be doing that too and learning more about it, but I look back, and three years ago, my samples are always telling me that I never had enough potassium in the plant.
So then we started to add more than just the dry granular stuff. We went to some of the potassium acetates and whatnot, and then I started to notice our soils in this area relatively high manganese, and I was running low on it. So then we started to add this and that, and just from basic understandings every time now that I apply nitrogen, we're putting sulfur down, and we also put potassium. Those nutrients work together. You kind of got the same thing with the zinc and phosphorus. So it kind of just starts to take on a life of its own when you're dealing with products, and if there's antagonisms if you have too much of one and not enough of the other, but I'm far from perfect. So we keep working on it, and for all of the maybe success I've had in some areas, I've had just as many challenges in others, and those are learning opportunities.
Michaela Paukner:
What do you think is one of the biggest things you learned this past year with this specific plot?
Steve Wilkins:
Sure. One of the biggest things that I learned I would say in 2021 is we were so dry early. In our area typically, we have too much water in May, and it delays us from planning date. I've never seen a spring as dry as what we had last year to the tune where we had winter wheat fields basically die over Memorial Day weekend. That's how dry it got in some of the lighter ground, and I didn't really know what to think of it, because the corn was growing, but it was just so dry. Things were happening that didn't make sense. So because of that I started to look at plant growth hormones and things like that that can help with stress reducing agents, and I had dabbled in them before, but I really used a lot of them last year, and there's a lot of products out there in the marketplace that work.
I myself used a couple from Stoller. That really worked well for me, and I saw a big difference in fields where I applied your gibberellic acid, your cytokinin, that type of stuff over those that I didn't, and I put that back on the stress reducing agents, and specifically I think last year, every two weeks I was applying a product probably called Bio-Forge Advanced, and that gave me some really, really big benefits that I didn't have on fields that I didn't use that on.
Michaela Paukner:
And do you think that that application strategy and all of the nutrients that you were putting on, was that the key to your high yield, or what do you think was behind that?
Steve Wilkins:
I certainly think it helps. I mean, to me the key to high yield is how many days... Or one, do I have my plants, and do I have a uniform set of plants? And then after that, I mean, I can do anything I want from an application or a fertilizer standpoint, but if I don't get proper sunlight, and water, and a good fall, I mean, it doesn't really make a difference. So to me, if I had to attribute it to one thing, it was probably we had a beautiful October last year, and I got two to three more weeks of grain fill that I didn't get, and sometimes I don't get on an average year. So I mean, I'll tell people that I talk to in the area undoubtedly 2020 I had a better crop than 2021. It just didn't work out because of the weather. So kind of my philosophy on corn, soybeans, wheat, whatever I grow is if I don't get a record yield, it's not because I didn't do anything.
It was because the weather didn't cooperate, and that's out of my hands, but the more that I see is you can implement a better fertility practice, and you can do some other things where you're not going to neutralize weather, but you can start to do a lot to mitigate stress on a plant that when you get hot, when you get dry, they'll hang in there quite a bit better than what most people would think. And I've started to tell a lot of customers that I work with off the farm that plants can handle stress a heck of a lot better sometimes than what we as people can when we observe them.
Michaela Paukner:
So for the nutrients that you're applying, are you doing that only on your high yield acres, or is this a program that you apply to all of your acres?
Steve Wilkins:
I pretty much run it across everything. If I find something that works, and it's ROI responsive, it'll go across the whole farm now. There's always a few acres that I'll play around with stuff and probably throw good money after bad, but once you find something that's net positive ROI and works, well, then I pretty much blanket it across the rest of the acres that I farm, and it just becomes part of the system, and it's really hard to say, "Does this do that?" Maybe, but I know if I don't have it, I definitely would consider myself a higher input farmer, but it wasn't always that way, just kind of evolved into it. In my personal situation, I don't have time to farm a whole lot of acres, and that's fine, but I make sure that the ones that I do, I try to get the most out of it, and it's a little bit of the game, and I enjoy it.
Michaela Paukner:
How are you measuring your costs and your return on investment?
Steve Wilkins:
Yeah, so I keep records almost at nausea. So I'm very numbers driven when it comes to a production side. And what I've always found out is commodity prices are relatively good now compared to the last couple of years, but when I first started kind of farming out on my own, prices weren't very good at all, and I just figured there's no possible way I could ever cut inputs enough to be profitable. The only way I could ever make things work on a balance sheet is to produce more, and so then when you start to look at, okay, what are things I need to produce more, kind of things just kind of take on a life of their own. So I'm very astute to the dollars and cents of all the inputs I value. I don't cut a lot of corners. I do look for a good value proposition from input providers that we work with. And we do business with three or four people, and we try to spread stuff around as much as possible, but cheap is definitely not in the vocabulary that I use.
And I try to look for things that are fairly priced, but bring a positive ROI, and we track it all. I mean, every scale ticket, we know what field it comes from, where within the field, geospatially referenced, everything. So we try to keep... I spend a lot of time looking at computer screens over winter, monitoring things, making plans for the next year.
Michaela Paukner:
What are your strategies for managing all that data, and what do you think that other people should be doing, maybe even if they're not doing it as intensely as you, but what they can start doing to see improvements on their own operation?
Steve Wilkins:
Sure. One of the things that I always like to tell people or just ask them is corn seed, the soybean seed, whatever it is that we as farmers plant, the potential of those genetics are sometimes three to four to five times more than what we're getting out of it. If you look at your large yield guys like a David Hula, who are claimed to be getting that 600 bushel mark, other people are still happy with a 200 bushel corn crop, and to me, a 200 bushel corn crop is pretty close to a crop failure. So I like to help people understand that the seed they're planting can do magnitudes more than what they're getting out of it, and therefore, invest in your crop. And sure it takes money, it takes capital, it's an investment, but it's pretty easy to see that you can get pretty strong returns in the process as well.
So what would I tell people? The first thing that I would tell them to start with is make sure you understand the genetics that you're getting, and the way you manage genetics actually can have a much bigger effect than planting the latest, greatest hybrid. The hybrid that I used last year was, I guess, five years old. So that's not exactly new genetics, and yet I still know there's things I can do different with that product to get more yield out of it. So understand where you're at from a yield standpoint, understand the capabilities, and I really like the notion of just make sure that you can continually get nutrients into that plant in a form that it needs, and when it needs it. It's simply the four Rs of nutrient management, and they're very simple, but they're very true.
Michaela Paukner:
And when you talk about the potential of the genetics of the seed, what exactly are you thinking about when you're trying to manage that?
Steve Wilkins:
Sure. So it's you look at all the things you can't control in production agriculture, and you look at the things you can control. And the one thing we can all control is when we decide to purchase a variety, in essence we've just set our yield ceiling, because a form of genetics can only go so high. So that's why I always inquire, and I ask questions, and I look at data for myself to figure out what's the subset of products that have a higher level yield potential, and those aren't necessarily warranted for every single acre that's out there, but on your more productive ground where on a good year, you see that yield monitor spike it more. You just know it's maybe the cow yard that was a dairy farm for 30 years, and it's just loaded with nutrients.
I definitely want people to plant a higher yielding hybrid. I'd encourage people, and one of the things that I do is I plant fuller season hybrids as well, and I don't like to pay to dry corn, but I'm not afraid to either, because as a manager I can buy LP to dry corn, but what I can't do is get yield potential after I plant it. So I always encourage people plant the fullest season that you can, because on average statistics will tell us for every single RM your yield potential goes up about three bushel an acre. So if you want to plant a 95 day corn versus 105, just know on paper you got about a 15 to 20 bushel yield opportunity by planting the fuller season one, and you can actually buy a fair amount of LP and gas to dry that down with the yield benefits that you get from that.
Michaela Paukner:
That's a really interesting perspective, and one that I think will resonate with a lot of people.
Steve Wilkins:
Yeah, it's really, I mean, farmers take a huge amount of risk, so control the controllables, and I fight this all the time with a lot of people that I work with. Nobody wants to dry corn because it's expensive. Well, yeah, it is, but if you let the dollars and cents really resonate with you, it actually most every single year pays. I think there is one year, 2019, things were wet, and that one hurt a little bit, but you can't let emotion get in front of statistics, numbers, data, whatever it is that make and drive decisions.
Michaela Paukner:
Talking about your equipment, I know you had mentioned earlier that you don't always need the fast, brand new equipment to get these high yields. So what are you doing with your equipment that's different, and what are some things that you've tried in the past that you won't go back to?
Steve Wilkins:
Sure. So I think I explained a little bit around our planter set up. We got dry liquid in-furrow on it. We actually, believed it or not, we still run older finger meters. So I certainly know if we'd move to... There's better on the market, but I think we still do given that technology, and I'm very pleased with the spacing and stuff that we have, and the seed drop, and the uniformity. So I would like to update that. I think in a short while we probably will, but I think you can overcome equipment limitations by genetics that you would select and by fertility type management. I think there's probably more yield that you can gain in that area than going out and buying the latest planter, which undoubtedly will do a better job of placing seed and spacing, and that's a strong component to yield, but that's going to give you bushels an acre. If we can do other things right, I think we can be looking at tens of bushels an acre that we can add to a bottom line. So that's one thing that I would say.
A few things I've done different is we had an old sprayer that we kind of ripped apart, turned it into a Y-drop bar. Absolutely loved doing that. I'll Y-drop everything. It's just really important to get nutrients at the base of that plant in case it gets dry. I mean, you think of it, we're in 30 inch rows. If you dig up a root system from the base of it, 95% of your roots are they go out eight inches from the center of the plant. So if you're in a 30 inch row, that means you've got 20, 22 inches where there's not a lot of activity going. So why do you want to put fertilizer there? Why do you want to maybe band anhydrous or something six inches below where your roots are never going to get?
There's just a lot we can do for better placement of fertility, and that's really important, especially right now with the cost of what NPK has done. And that's why I always tell people, "You can buy a few things of equipment to run across your acres. High yields don't always necessarily mean you need to put a lot more nutrients down." Most every year I can run about a 0.65 to at worst at 0.8 pound of N per bushel of corn, and we have good soils. The average is probably at 2.8 to a 3.0 organic matter, so they're not great. I mean, they're good, but we're not getting huge amounts of mineralization that are making up for lack of nitrogen.
So it's just it's key to get nutrients to that plant, and then understand that if you are putting nutrients to the plant, a lot of nitrogen, a lot of sulfur, even some other ones, they're about 30% of it's taken up after pollination. So you need fertilizer late into the season and after your plant tassels, your root system is done growing. So again, if you don't have nutrients where it needs it, it's not going to go find it. And August is a dry month, so you're not going to get a lot of water to keep pushing fertility into that root, so it could intercept it. So I can't underestimate and understate just how important I think fertilizer in that root zone is for so many different reasons, and I've probably started to use significantly more liquid potassium acetate in some of our droughtier soils. Boy, has that changed a lot of our performance on there, and I can get plant available potassium into that root zone, and it can take it up late into the season.
And my day job keeps me pretty busy. There's some years I don't start combining corn until after Thanksgiving, and in Wisconsin that gets kind of late. There could be snow on the ground, but I'll still combine green corn that late into the year, because I don't want my plans to ever die. I want those things to be alive as long as they possibly can, and even after a killing frost, that stalk will still stay green. And I've learned that the hard way, because when I first started farming, I wasn't quite there, and I combined corn with a bean platform before, because I didn't have my fertility right, and let me tell you, that was not an enjoyable experience. So you do that a few times, and you start to learn really quick about what not to do and how to fix it.
Brian O'Connor:
We'll get back to Michaela Paukner and Steve Wilkins in a moment. First, I want to thank our sponsor, Source by Sound agriculture. Nutrients cost more today and can be hard to get when you need them. Thankfully, there's a better source of plant nutrition. It's your soil. Source from Sound Agriculture unlocks more of the nitrogen and phosphorus in your fields. Learn more about Source at www.sound.ag. And now back to Steve and Michaela.
Michaela Paukner:
What's something you will never do again that you think other people can learn from?
Steve Wilkins:
Something I will never do again? Probably what I just shared. There was the second farm that I bought the first year I went in there, and really it was a neighbor's property, so I had an idea on what it was, but didn't understand the fertility quite right, and I really pushed it, and I didn't have the fertility to push the population what I wanted to do. And I remember Labor Day weekend I walked that field, and I tripped on a stone that I didn't pick, and I grabbed a corn plant as I was pulling down, and it just crinkled in my hand. And so I split a few stalks, and they were hollow, and I was like, "Oh my goodness."
The corn had the really big yield on it, because it put everything into the ear, but the standability was horrible, and that corn probably was at two third milk line. So by the time we combined it, it was the flattest corn I've ever had in my life, and we took the bean platform out there to get what we could off of it, but to me that goes back to I didn't understand the fertility component, and we did that, and two years later, after I got all the volunteer corn fixed and cleaned up, I put corn back in there again, and to this day that's the highest yielding corn field average I've ever had at a little over 280 bushel an acre. So it just shows what a little bit of pain and then attention to detail can do.
Michaela Paukner:
Mm-hmm. And now as you're looking ahead to 2023, what are some things that are on your mind that you'll be tweaking, or continuing, or what are your plans?
Steve Wilkins:
Sure. So one of the biggest things that we're doing this year with our crop rotation is we have it set up we're going to do a lot more field tile. I think if I can get water off the fields quicker in the spring, get them to warm up a little bit, that'll get me an earlier planting date, and I know that I'm losing a little bit of yield, because I'll probably wait a week longer than what I want to to make sure my temps and everything are right. So we're putting pretty sizeable investments into field tile water drainage, trying to get everything correct from that standpoint. After that, I tend to be very high on populations, and most of the stuff that I plant is on the low side of 38,000, the high side of 42. Probably going to back that down maybe say probably won't be in the forties, I guess is what I'd say going forward.
I think we can probably maintain yield, and we don't have to be quite that high from a population standpoint. So I'll be looking at population a little bit. Ideally, I do believe if you're not getting about 10 bushels... I'm sorry, excuse me, if you're not getting about seven bushels per 1,000 plants, you probably don't have to increase your population. So I probably need to work a little bit more to understand why I got to be quite a bit higher on a population to get the yields that we tend to get, because I don't think we actually have to be, but that's kind of where I've ended up the last couple of years. So population is the second one that I want to look at.
And I'm very intrigued by a lot of this talk of what actually goes into the furrow of the plant on the planter. There's a lot of work on sugars, biologicals. That's a really unique and evolving sector, and there's some people that'll tell me, "Never put phosphorus in-furrow," and I've always been a very big believer of that, and I try to put as much in there as I can. So there's some different thoughts out there, and I certainly think my in-furrow program probably looks different in a couple of years as we continue to learn more about that and what it looks like.
Michaela Paukner:
And I'm sorry if you mentioned this already, but are you currently using biologicals?
Steve Wilkins:
Yeah, we use a little bit. I think I started dabbling in some in 2020, used a few in 2021, used a few more this year. I got a really good agronomist that I bounce a lot of ideas off. He gives me great feedback, and I just trust the guy. So if he tells me to try something, I usually don't ask too many questions, and I go with it, but I've got a lot to learn there. I think there is a lot to learn there, and if I can get something that I can put in-furrow that maybe makes nutrients in the ground more available, or that helps build my root system to access more quicker and gives me more growth, that's great.
I love to walk through a corn field and look at what's above ground, but everything that happens is below ground, and it's just so important to make sure that you don't compromise your root system, you don't have your down pressure set wrong. There's just so many things that when that planter goes across the field, or if you're doing tillage, you don't want to restrict the root zone at any level, because it will come back, and it's going to cost you yield and money.
Michaela Paukner:
For the biologicals, which ones are you currently using and have you seen any effects so far?
Steve Wilkins:
That's a great question. I could not tell you brand names, which ones that I'm using. I can tell you I get them from the Wilbur-Ellis company, but specifically what they are I could not tell you that, but they're on the line of humic acids, okay? so that much I do know, and we've used them now for a couple of years, and we're putting them in-furrow, and that's about what I got on them, so I got a lot to learn.
Michaela Paukner:
I know we all have a lot to learn about biologicals at this point, but so talking about what you mentioned before, how conventional tillage, how damaging that can be, and I'm assuming that's part of the reason why you switched to no-till, so I'm hoping that you can tell me a little bit about how and why you decided to turn [inaudible 00:34:54].
Steve Wilkins:
Sure. So if I think back, I was in high school, and we had a wet spring, and we had a hayfield that didn't make it through winter, and it was a wet spring, so it was a late spring. And I just remember walking out in the field with my dad and kind of just wondering what to do, and we kind of just looked at each other at the same time and said, "Well, what if we just plant into this? Why not?" And so we did, and it was our best corn that year. It was absolutely phenomenal. All right. Okay, we're onto something.
And so then you just start planting stuff, and you do a little bit more, and so we put row cleaners in the planter, and you just start changing things, and we put the no-till cultures on, and that's kind of what manifested itself. But we struggled with it for quite a while, and then 2012 came, and that year we were still I would say in a lot of transition, but we had a couple of the fields that we no-tilled corn in, and we were running about 200 bushel in 2012 in that drought. Then we had a few fields that we did corn on, corn conventional tillage, and we could not get out of the 80 bushel mark. And so that really kind of makes you stop and think like, "My goodness."
You look at soil health, water holding capacity, all that other stuff, and that kind of solidified I think our desire to continue to stay with a no-till type of system, and where possible we do as much as we can. It's worked out well. It's certainly taught us patience, but when you get into dry stretches like we're having now, and it looks like we will going forward, I really don't see our corn or soybeans rolling or tightening up when you can go to some areas in our general area, and you can see people that run their fields wet. They've got compaction issues, yellow crops, and that costs you yield when you do that.
Michaela Paukner:
Mm-hmm. When you were first getting started with no-till, how did you learn the nuances of the system?
Steve Wilkins:
Trial and error. If I could go back and do it all over again, we probably should have put significantly more tile in some fields before we started, because we're going to have to go back and do some of that now, and I certainly think that would have helped us, especially on wet years to get the water off, get the ground to warm up sooner. Yeah, if I could go back to when we kind of started this, that would've been the first thing that I would've done is took the money that I saved from all the fuel and equipment from conventional tillage and put it right into tile and paid that off as quick as I possibly could have. And I guess I think we're a little late to the dance on that, but that's where we're at right now is a lot of money is going into water flow, and drainage, and stuff.
So that would be the biggest thing, but I don't know too many farmers in our immediate area who do a whole lot of no-till. And some of that's because we've got some pretty sizable dairies, and they've got manure and other things, and they just run a little bit different system. So there wasn't a whole lot of neighbors to go and talk to. Now I think the practice has sped up, and we see a bunch more people doing it, and that's great. It's better for the environment, and I think it's probably better for their bottom line too, but trial and error. Every year we're changing something on the planter. It never fails.
Michaela Paukner:
Mm-hmm. Talking about the tiling, I don't know much about what it takes to put tile in. So does that have an effect on your soil that's because you're no-tilling, and now you're putting tile in?
Steve Wilkins:
Absolutely. So what tile has done for us is in the month of April and May is getting the excess water off of the fields and out of the soil as quick as possible, so our soils are drying quicker. They're warming faster in the spring, and those fields were able to get on them almost as early as what you could if you were in a conventional tiller or strip till, but we're only taking out the excess water, so the soils are still at capacity for the rest of the year. So that's really helping us out in spring, and when you have saturated soils, you have a whole other host of problems of nutrient availability, oxygen space, just overall soil health. So I'm a big fan of tile. It's the number one expense I have on the farm for multiple years running, and it probably will be for the next few until we get everything tiled to where we want it, and the water flow where we want it to go.
Michaela Paukner:
So the benefits that you're getting with the tile, with the better water flow and management, that outweighs having to disturb the soil to put the tile in?
Steve Wilkins:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I don't ever anticipate having to retile anything that we're doing now as long as I farm. So I look at it as a one time investment for the property that we tile, and it should last me my farming career and hopefully into the next persons as well. A lot of the tile that we have in our fields right now was put in in the fifties, so that's had almost an 80 year run, and now is starting to have some challenges, and the stuff that we're putting in today is a lot better than what they had back then, and we can put in better control valves, and drainage flows, and stuff like that. So to me it's one of the best things that we've done for yield potential, and as well as just overall soil health and soil quality. I can certainly tell you our earthworm population, our mag levels, a lot of other key indicators of soils have gotten significantly better where we can control excess water.
Michaela Paukner:
Okay. And are you guys using cover crops right now?
Steve Wilkins:
Yeah, absolutely. I've really liked planting soybeans into cover crops. The single biggest challenge that I have growing soybeans is white mold. And so if I can get a good mat of rye to help trick those spores into sporulating before the flowers are on the beans to infect white mold, and that's just huge for me. I mean, we raise really good corn, and if you look at the ratio of corn to beans, we're not anywhere close on bean yields as what we should be for the corn yields that we're getting. Last year was our best year on our farm raising beans, and we were well into the 70 bushel average, which I'm pleased with. I think that's good, but the corn was still a heck of a lot better, and that goes back to just the unbelievable disease pressure that we have specifically to white mold. So cover crops have really helped me kind of dial down that white mold pressure and really help take our bean yields I think to a more appropriate type level.
Michaela Paukner:
Are you just putting the cereal rye on your soybean acres, or are you doing that across the board?
Steve Wilkins:
No, we'll put them onto the corn acres as well, and certainly anything that's in winter wheat we'll get a multi-species type of deal in addition to that, and we've got a couple of fields that are enrolled in long term programs for soil health as well. So we certainly want to do everything we can to regenerate some fields that have not had the best treatment in years past and get the soil to be as healthy as possible. And everyone wins in that, because if I get a healthier soil, then I can get higher organic matter. Now my water holding capacity goes up. That'll help me raise a better crop. If I can get more organic matter, I can expect more mineralization for nitrogen, so I should be able to use less on that front. So some people really have a problem figuring out how soil health pays, and to me it's like an absolute no brainer. I mean, what's the value of an extra inch of water to your crop on August 15th when it needs it? You can't put a price tag on that, but that's what it helps do.
Michaela Paukner:
And then what are you using to terminate the rye?
Steve Wilkins:
Pretty simple. I mean, it's glyphosate has worked very, very well. I wouldn't mind going to a roller crimper. That to me would be a nice addition. We're just not there yet. Time, equipment is kind of a limiting factor. That would be a nice addition for it, but typically I'll put in a residual herbicide, go in with glyphosate, and I typically spray after we plant as well, so that it's a nice system right now, and we'll continue to do more of it going forward as well.
Michaela Paukner:
And what is your typical planting date for the rye?
Steve Wilkins:
Well, I mean, as soon as the beams are off, usually we can have it in by October 10th to the 15th in the fall corn. I mean, sometimes I planted rye in spring, so it's the first... Kind of like as soon as the frost was out of the ground, you put it in, so it gets growing and stuff, and it grows and does what I want it to do, and then we'll spray it off, and I would like to get it all planted in the fall, but sometimes I don't combine corn until late again, and I actually like combining corn late on frozen ground, so I don't leave any compaction zones to the combine or the tractor and the cart or anything. So sometimes the spring for the soybeans that are going to be planted come out of last year's corn crop.
Michaela Paukner:
Okay. And then you mentioned white mold was a problem for your soybeans.
Steve Wilkins:
Sure.
Michaela Paukner:
Aside from the cereal rye, what are you using to combat that?
Steve Wilkins:
Yeah, white mold I could almost tell you is one of the banes of my existence. I've seen white mold take 80 bushel bean fields we've had down to 20, so that's not a lot of fun. White mold, I mean, I control it primarily with variety. There's a couple of lines in the industry that still have phenomenal topic yield, but actually control white mold incredibly well. So I'm very particular on the beans that we plant, and there's about three different varieties from a single company that we'll go with I think are the best in the industry on white mold. So variety is one, and then I'm a heavy sprayer for white mold as well.
I make a massive investment in two products called Omega and Endura. They're very expensive. It's not uncommon for me by the time I use those products with application costs, I mean, my gosh, you can be $80 to $100 an acre just to fight white mold, but I also know when I do that, I don't get mold hardly at all. So then I figure to me it's anywhere from 30 to 50 bushel yield that I'm getting back, so that investment is still worth it. It's just really expensive, and I'm hoping that rye really will help eliminate not just my weed pressure, but also the white mold spore, so I don't have to keep spending that money on it.
Michaela Paukner:
Mm-hmm. I think your outlook, it goes back to what you had said earlier on that you don't like to do things cheap. You want to do it to make it work, and it sounds like you really are making it work.
Steve Wilkins:
Yeah, I mean if you think about it here in 2022, the year that we're in, I mean, you got a corn crop that's probably worth $1,200 to $1,500 an acre depending on your yield, and what you market it that. Why are you going to let dollars an acre of a product deter you from realizing that? And on beans you might be $1,000 dollars an acre, so there's just no way I'm going to shy away from putting down an extra application that I think is going to add yield, because it might be a long time before we ever have prices like this again. So I'm all one for yield. I've yet to figure out how not having a max yield is ever in your benefit.
Michaela Paukner:
Was there anything else you wanted to add that we haven't talked about?
Steve Wilkins:
I think really maybe the only other item that we've started to do a little bit different is we're much heavier into winter wheat the past couple of years. So we've always grown some, but a quarter to maybe a third of our acres this year are into wheat, and that third crop is, boy, that's really helped us out from a wheat control standpoint. I think we do a really good job controlling our... We have marestail, water hemp, ragweed, things like that, but different rotation breaks disease cycles. I really value that as well, and that's really helping us drop our chemical pricing and programs on the row crop of corn and soybeans too. So I like that. I will continue to do more of it. I don't necessarily like pulling the combine out in the middle of the summer just for that, but it's been a good thing, and I see more people across the corn belt doing that as well. So certainly the price of wheat helps, but three crops in a rotation makes all of them better.
Michaela Paukner:
So you're doing one year corn, one year soybeans, one year wheat every three years?
Steve Wilkins:
Typically, if it works out well in a 10 year cycle, I like to have two years of wheat, two years of beans, six years of corn. For myself, on paper that's the most profitable. So you could think of it like a corn, corn, beans, wheat, corn, corn, beans, that type of deal is that's how I've got it to pencil out kind of out the best, and that's kind of what I'm starting to work and strive towards. I've done three years continuous corn no-till. We've had phenomenal success with it, haven't tried four years yet. I might on a few fields, but, boy, that takes an extra level of patience and management that's tough to do. I know some guys that are long term no-till, and I just love talking to them, but continuous no-till corn is, boy, that's tough.
Michaela Paukner:
What do you think the secret is to managing that continuous long term corn?
Steve Wilkins:
Well, so some of that will depend where you're at. In my specific area, for me it would be residue management, because I tend to combine so late. I don't get any breakdown in the fall, so it's all sitting there in the spring for me, and you look at the carbon penalty you got to pay. It's really hard to get that crop established, so that's what I would put is number one. Maybe on a broader scale, controlling insects would be probably a larger deal if specifically you have corn root worms and things like that. Boy, that can really be challenging, and then managing disease, but there's some really good fungicide on the market that you can use to help control that.
And I'm not going to say that's easy, but to me, if you're going to do that system, then you probably ought to be spraying to keep your plants as healthy as possible, and that's one thing that we do too. Every acre we have is sprayed sometimes multiple times. So corn, we typically run a two pass on fungicide and rarely do I actually run it for disease. More so it's for the plant health benefits, and that helps us out a lot.
Michaela Paukner:
We're doing a little sidebar thing with the article, and I was just wondering if you were using any seed treatments?
Steve Wilkins:
Absolutely. Huge into seed treatment. So on the soybean side, we use products from Syngenta, and it would be their CruiserMaxx Vibrance Seed Treatment, and then we'll also put on a treatment for sudden death syndrome, which is the Saltro product as well. So quite frankly, sometimes I paid more for the seed treatment than I have the actual soybean seed itself. We put that much value on the seed treatment, because when we're no-tilling our beans into all of this corn residue, you've got grubs. You've got wire worms. You've got so much stuff out there. Those beans need all the help they can get, and we continually cut our populations back on soybeans. Some of that is to help with white mold as well.
So seed treatment to me is just it's a given on corn. No one questions it on corn, so why would you do it on soybeans? It just blows my mind. No, we're huge on that. Beans will put inoculants and everything on it as well, but we're large into that. I don't think we really overtreat anything on corn. We'll put some micronutrients on the seed and place it like a graphite or a talc, but corn pretty much is what it is. You don't get many options from seed manufacturers, but soybeans, soybeans get everything we can give them.
Michaela Paukner:
Is there a particular equipment dealer that you wanted us to name for the little sidebar?
Steve Wilkins:
Well, we work primarily with a John Deere dealership, Riesterer & Schnell, up in Chilton, and that's where my brother works as well. He's a salesman for them, so it works out really, really well. We get to keep things in the family, and it's just it's a really nice deal for us, so not all of our equipment is John Deere. I mean, our planters are Kinze, and so for that you can get Kinze parts almost everywhere, so probably don't work with the specific one, but the John Deere dealer Riesterer & Schnell is the one that we're most closely aligned and associated with.
Michaela Paukner:
What are your soil types in your area?
Steve Wilkins:
Sure. So I mean, they vary like everywhere. Our predominant soil types around [inaudible 00:54:26] is silty clay loams. That's probably two thirds of what we farm. So they're good soils. Most of it are 2% to 6% slopes, 2.5%, 3% organic matter is pretty favorable, CECs and stuff like that, so they're nice. And I grew up on the soils, so I feel like I have an understanding of how to work with them too, but it's interesting if I go back and look at a soil test from say 1995 versus one from 2005 and today. If we work with them, we can change them, and we can change them for the better.
Michaela Paukner:
Mm-hmm. Well, those are all my questions. I really appreciate you making time for me.
Steve Wilkins:
No, I apologize that I couldn't be back, and you couldn't come out to the farm and visit, but maybe next time. It's really, really tough in eastern Wisconsin to compete in yields, because we just have so many limiting factors. So what happened last year won't happen every year. I've been working a while at it, but hopefully it happens again. So the highest I saw last year in the yield monitor was 360, so I know there's a bit more out there that we can go after. It's just figuring out how to do it, and what needs to be done.
Michaela Paukner:
But it sounds like you have that mindset where you're determined to figure it out and keep trying until you do.
Steve Wilkins:
Yeah, yeah, I enjoy it. I mean, if I farmed thousands upon thousands of acres, I probably wouldn't be quite as intense, but I don't, and that's okay. So I try to make sure that everyone that we do farm, we get the most out of it.
Brian O'Connor:
That's it for this week's episode. I'd like to thank our sponsors, Sourced by Sound Agriculture, once again for helping to make this no-till podcast series possible. If you like today's discussion, the full take on Steve Wilkins' approach to high yielding No-till corn is available on our website is part of the Pushing the Boundaries of Yield Potential special report. It's all about no-tillers who participate in and win the NCGA annual yield contest. Just visit our store tab from the main page for a description and to consider a purchase. A link can also be found in this episode's webpage. More podcasts about No-Till farming are available over at No-tillfarmer.com/podcasts. A transcript of this episode will be available there shortly.
You can also subscribe, so you can get a notification whenever we put out a new episode of any of our podcasts. If you have feedback on today's episode, please feel free to email me at Boconnor@Lessitermedia or call me at (262) 777-2413. You can also keep up on the latest no-till farming news by registering online for our No-Till Insider daily and weekly email updates, and our Dry Land No-Tiller eNewsletter, and make sure to follow us on Facebook or Twitter. For our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm lead content editor, Brian O'Connor. Thanks for listening and farm ugly.
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