This one comes to us from Connor Sible, research associate at the University of Illinois and 2024 National No-Tillage Conference speaker. He checks in with an update on a residue management study.  

“One of the things we’ve been doing in residue management is no-till. You spray these biologicals on the field, and you put them out there to degrade the no-till residue. But one of the questions we have in this study is if you spray your residue-decomposing biologicals, should you till them under or leave them as no-till? We have this study finally planted. We put the treatments out here. We’re looking at different biologicals for residue decomposition. Should we leave them on the surface? Maybe they’ll have a better efficacy because we’re not incorporating the residues with tillage. Or if you spray the biologicals and then incorporate them, do you maybe get better cycling when you put those microbes in the soil, or do they just get outcompeted by all the native microbes that are already doing that great work for us?”  

Excited to see what the results are. We’ll have an update for you when it’s available.

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.