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Dan Fohrman, No-Tiller, Dover, Minn.

Dover, Minn., no-tillers Dan and Abby Fohrman raised a no-till yield of 298.95 bushels in 2023, securing them a first-place win in the National Corn Growers Association’s Minnesota no-till non-irrigated category last year.

In today’s episode of the podcast, brought to you by The Andersons’ Over Pass Lineup, contributing writer Laura Barrera talks with Dan Fohrman about his contest-winning corn yield and his approach to raising high-yield no-till corn.

If you want more advice on raising high-yield no-till corn, check out No-Till Farmer’s latest special report, Unlocking Your Corn’s Yield Potential.

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   Full Transcript

Michaela Paukner:

Welcome to the No-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by the Ultimate Lineup by the Andersons. I'm Michaela Paukner, Managing Editor at No-Till Farmer.

In today's episode of the podcast, contributing writer Laura Barrera talks with Minnesota, No-Tiller, Dan Fohrman about his 2023 contest winning 299 bushel corn yield and Dan's approach to raising high-yield, no-till corn.

Laura Barrera:

Can you just tell me a little bit about your farm, how many acres you farm, what crops do you grow, that sort of thing?

Dan Fohrman:

Yeah, so I farm here in southeast Minnesota, Dover, St. Charles area. I farm under 500 acres of my own stuff that I own and rent. And then I work with my uncle and my cousin where we work together with equipment. And then I work with another gentleman, he's kind of a mentor of mine, he was a friend of my dad's. He's almost, well I think he's 80 now, Darrell, so he used to run quite a few acres, but he's been scaling back.

So together I think it's down to 1200 acres that I end up harvesting and running over all the different ground and different tillage practices and different planters, twenty-inch row, thirty-inch row. Corn and soybean with, I got a little bit of hay that I run too in the rotation. I'm all pretty much minimum till I'd say. I do do no-till, but sometimes I scratch the ground just a little bit with a vertical tillage unit to shake the rye seed down to the soil so it can get a little bit of seed to soil contact.

But basically no-till on what was beans the year before and just scratch that corn up a little bit to cut the stock up a little bit, but not disturb the root mass or the root balls. And with cover crops, I run a hundred percent cover crops on my own ground, so plant green. Started farming with my dad probably 10 years ago. Before that I was in the auto collision repair industry and my dad was looking for somebody to come farm with him after he sold the dairy cows and I got the chance to come farm and it's been working out good. So we found out a lot of stuff over the years.

Laura Barrera:

Perfect. Great. How long have you been no-tilling?

Dan Fohrman:

We started the no-till venture in 2017, I think. It was a wet year and the year before was wet and we just were having a hard time getting everything kind of worked up in the fall, so I just told my dad, let's leave it, and see what happens. And we tried cover crops too, that same time where I did kind of a side-by-side trial on just a 25 acre field that was soybeans and I put rye in strips in there and it was kind of a light bulb moment because we planted maybe 600 acres or something and it was tough going, everything was wet and we got in that rye and the soil tilth was great, so we just kept with it. It's a good way to save on fuel and equipment and especially when you're running by yourself.

Laura Barrera:

Yeah. Great. So now I want to talk about your 2023 contest corn. You placed second in Minnesota for no-till non-irrigated with just over 298 bushels. Can you tell me about what was different about your 2023 contest corn compared to the rest of your corn?

Dan Fohrman:

Well, the only thing that was really different, which is the first year I've tried this, I did a fungicide with a ground rig with a self-propelled sprayer at tassel. So that field did produce a little bit better than my other contest field that I just did, the aerial application with the helicopter. But I had a lot more juice in the tank and you get better coverage. So I think the ground rig stuff, application for fungicide is a smart move if you got the resources around to do it.

Laura Barrera:

And was that a preventive spray, or were there specific problems that you've experienced in the past that you were dealing with this year that the fungicide was able to treat?

Dan Fohrman:

We started using fungicides probably about 10 years ago, or maybe it's been 12 now, when I first started farming. And even on a dry year, we used to do a lot of trials and side-by-sides and even on a dry year or wet year when you have more fungus and fungi out there, it seemed like it always paid. So we just, it's a practice that we use and I also throw other things in the tank too, to promote flowering and stuff like that, boron and other things. So it's just a good pass, you can tissue sample ahead of it and see what you're lacking and make sure that you got what you want in the plant during that flowering and seed grain fill period. You don't want to run short.

Laura Barrera:

And do you recall what fungicide you were using for that?

Dan Fohrman:

I use a couple different kinds. I've been running with Bayer because we run a lot of DEKALB seed products, so we run the Bayer rewards. We've had real good luck with DEKALB seed. It's just done us wonders. And they got such a wide variety of different hybrids for different types of ground. So I stick with the Bayer products typically.

Laura Barrera:

Do you typically treat your contest corn differently from the rest of your corn, or is it kind of a, it's a specific spot where you have maybe better soil and you tend to see higher yields, but it's treated the same way as everything else?

Dan Fohrman:

So all my contest corn, I keep on my home farm at 240 acre farm and I do a lot of beta testing and my own type of trial work on new stuff that's out, new biologicals, or I shouldn't say biologicals, but biology food. Food for the soil, food for the biology in the soil. So the only thing that I really do different because once I do the beta testing, if it works then I move it on all the acres.

After a year or two, I just put it on the whole program and that's kind of the way I run things. I side dress everything now. I don't put anything ahead of the crop so I don't spread any nitrogen out in front and I just try to, the only thing I do differently is I do do a little bit of wide dropping at home where I do side-by-side replicated trials, but I really haven't seen a huge return on that. So I'm still working on trying to get that late application of trying to boost my K levels, it what I'm trying to do.

Laura Barrera:

And that Y drop application, when do you typically go in with that?

Dan Fohrman:

I do it with a pull type sprayer, so I got to get in there, because I do all my own spraying and herbicide, so I try to get in there before it canopies completely, so it ain't so hard to get through. V-7, I would say.

Laura Barrera:

And a second ago you mentioned biologicals, are there specific products that you've seen that you've had good success with or seem to be making changes to the soil that you want to see?

Dan Fohrman:

So see, that was always a challenge early when I first got started because not a lot of co-ops have that type of humic and fulvic acids and carbon and sugars. So I used to have to go to the grocery store and fill up a cart full of sugar and people gave me funny looks and stuff. Now, the companies that I like to work with, Concept AgriTek, Monty's Plant products. They work with growers that want to feed the soil and let the biology in the soil make the nutrients for the crop instead of trying to pump it full of dry fertilizer and expecting that to work.

So like carbon sugar, humics, fulvics, I run a lot of that stuff and a little bit of biologicals that I run from Hefty's, they got some good stuff, they got that alpha complete that I run, I put that on all my acres now. That's something that I put in for all. Otherwise, I'm trying to think for biologicals what I'd really use that would be bugs in a jug. There ain't nothing that I really use for that because it's hard to straighten out your soils with putting more bugs in it. You got so much out there already, so just to feed them, you're better off than to try to put, I mean that little bit that you're putting in there, what you spend on it, I don't see a lot of return. There is some new stuff that's out there now that Monty's has that I'm going to try this year, but yeah.

Laura Barrera:

Gotcha. Like what you were just talking about, about applying the carbon and the sugar and the humic acid, when did you start doing that? And did you see a yield increase from when you first started adding those?

Dan Fohrman:

It all depends on the year. The hard part is judging everything on the year once you put it into full program. So I did see return on the plant structure and the health of it. Stocks were more round, they were heavier stocks, better rip mass and just tons more worms. And anytime you got worms out there, I call that my feedlot now, because I sold all the cattle a couple of years ago, so now that's my feedlot. I don't have to haul the manure out there, the worms make it for me and that's my livestock out there. As long as I treat that ground right and feed that biology with sugars and humics and fulvics, it does it for itself. The worms are full of nitrogen too, I think they're 25% nitrogen or something. I just learned that today from Gary Zimmer.

Laura Barrera:

Interesting. Have you ever done earthworm counts?

Dan Fohrman:

Not a ton of them. I just know that when I'm digging for seed, you can't hardly not find a worm. They're right in that furrow and as soon as we started using a lot of, once we put liquid and furrow on the planter about, I don't know if that was about six or seven years ago, that really upped it, you seen it instantly when you're out there checking for emergence. They were just attracted to it.

Laura Barrera:

Interesting. Okay. So you said that you started doing in-furrow about six or seven years ago. Did you see any difference in your corn yield from doing that?

Dan Fohrman:

I seen a difference in my tissue samples. So by giving it a little bit more phosphorus and I did see quicker emergence. And anytime you can get quicker emergence and more even emergence, you will stack some yield up. But to say it's hard to see the three to four or five bushels when you're doing side-by-side replicates when you're going off the monitor. But now it's not so much of me putting phosphorus in there, it's about putting some zinc and putting the sugars and the humics in there. I wouldn't go without it now that I do it. It's like the rye, I wouldn't go without putting rye out there. Because the rye is really good at extraditing sugars out of the roots and it helps move stuff throughout the soil vertically without having to do tillage.

Laura Barrera:

Gotcha, yeah. You also mentioned before that you're using DEKALB seed. Can you just talk me through how you go about choosing the right genetics for getting high yielding corn?

Dan Fohrman:

For sure, yeah. So we planted pioneer, producers, cropland, a lot of different hybrids over the years. When my dad was with us farming, we'd try a lot of different stuff, but it just seemed that DEKALB has enough hybrids out there and that I really don't like to go anywhere else. They treat a guy good, they're agronomists are good. And my agronomist is really good with picking out the hybrids for different types of soil type and fertility on different farms. And they got so many different hybrids, I really don't see the need to go somewhere else to get something different. So this year I'm pretty much a hundred percent DEKALB.

Laura Barrera:

Oh, okay. Going back to your contest corn, what do you think was the main key or keys to what contributed to your yield this year in getting second place in that category? Was there anything that, looking back, you thought this is what really took that yield up to where it was able to get second place?

Dan Fohrman:

Yeah, it was the first year we broke a 300 bushel. My wife Abby had the first place.

Laura Barrera:

Oh, okay, great.

Dan Fohrman:

I think a lot of it was, I put liquid, I bought a planner with liquid on it instead of dry fertilizer. And I think that now that I can cocktail the two by two, the starter, not the pop-up, but the starter with other micros, like I can put zinc in there, I can put fulvic, I can put different, boron. I can use manganese, all different kinds of things. And then it seems like my tissue levels are rising with that.

Laura Barrera:

At the beginning of the call you mentioned that, did you say you do both 20 and 30 inch rows? Or you've experimented with both?

Dan Fohrman:

So the gentleman, the friend of my dad's that I work with, Darrell that I started out doing all of his harvesting, running his combine and maintenancing his equipment, he runs 20-inch rows, so that's what we did with all his stuff. This last year we did all thirties except for the beans, we ran 20-inch rows on the beans. And it seems like thirties just seem to work better for my style of doing things because it's easier to side dress. And if you got your planner set right, planner performance is the most important thing anytime you're starting to spread them rows out to 30-inch, you want to make sure your seeds are spaced perfectly and your singulations set.

So 20-inch rows you can get by with maybe not such a fancy planner, I think. And I'm not a big fan of 20's, I just haven't been. But as long as your planner performance is set up and you got that planner running good, that's the main thing. And that's some of the things that maybe sets me apart from the rest of the peoples. I take that pretty seriously, and I tear down that planner every year. And this last year was the first year I did a flag test on emergence on all 12 rows and then I took it to yield. So I took out two different sections in the field and two different hybrids. I flagged it all and then I went back out there after black layer and I weighed all the rows out so I knew how much lag I had on certain rows.

Today I just had a gentleman down in Missouri set me up with all new parallel arms to tighten up the planer. What I found was that some of the rows that were down over 20 bushel compared to the other rows, so that'd be like two bushels per acre or something, or less once you do the math. But I had two rows that were over 20 bushels off. Well, the parallel arms in them were really loose for some reason I was probably getting a lot more shake and rattle out of the planter row unit and no-till, that's really important.

So this Joe Hall out of Clinton, Missouri working with, he's a pretty good guy and it's really cost-effective. He machines all the parallel arms for me and you don't have to buy all new ones and stuff. So he's going to get them sent up to me and get going on that. He's pretty smart and willing to work with a guy, so.

Laura Barrera:

Perfect. I'm glad you mentioned your planter because that is something I wanted to talk about, is your setup and how it's evolved over the years. So can you just walk me through, first of all what kind of planter you have and just how you have it currently set up?

Dan Fohrman:

So we've always ran John Deere planters. We've always liked the John Deere tractor planter set up. I run AG Leader Technology on it so I can see singulation row by row. And then some of the things that have changed since we went from full tillage to no-till is we put different closing wheels on, we run the furrow cruisers, which I really like them, they've worked good for us and they work on all different soil types too. So if you go over and you plant conventional for somebody else, it's a really good deal, especially if it's a little wet out there, you can fracture that sidewall a little bit.

And then in front of the closing we'll set up some things we've changed since we went no-till is, now I got the row cleaners that are ran pneumatically so I can run them up and down a little bit and I try to put a little lift on there so I'm not digging into soil making things muddy. I do not run a disc in front of my seed disc. So a lot of guys with no-till they always say you got to run a disc to cut the trash out in front of your seed disc. And I never was a fan of that, it mud stuff up and it just doesn't work the way I think it should. So the only thing I'm doing is brushing a little bit away with that Martin Row cleaner and lifting on it, I'm not pushing down. I'm lifting on it so it's barely running. If you hit a bump it'll pop up a little bit.

And then behind the seed discs, I run a seed firmer from Keeton and what I used to do was run them seed firmers, the old Keeton's with a Mojo wire so it puts more pressure down on the seed when you're going across it. So that way it kind of, if it's wet and muddy sometimes the seed firmers will build up with mud and then you'll drag seed and things will get ugly. But with that new seed firmer from Keeton, they call it low stick, it's a black one and that's how I deliver my in furrow too, is out behind the seed, I put it on top. It seems to work really well and I really liked that combo.

When I bought the planter it had, the fertilizer going out in front of the seed and I didn't like the fact that I was running a seed firmer down through moisture more than I had to. So I put it out the back and that works really good.

Laura Barrera:

Oh, okay. Interesting. So by putting out the back, it's not mudding up the soil as much?

Dan Fohrman:

Right, because see, some people like putting it down underneath the seed, I spray it right on top of the seed because I'm not using such harsh fertilizers. I'm not really putting much fertilizer in furrow. It's more of a biological type setup where I'm just putting in food for the worms and bugs. So yeah, it sprays it out on the top, out the back of the seed firmer. So the liquid tube runs right through the seed firmer and it just sprays it right out the back. And I have not had a problem with them since we ran them for the last seven years. They really work well.

Laura Barrera:

And that planter, it's a 12 row on 30 inches you said?

Dan Fohrman:

Yep, 12 row John Deere 1770NT.

Michaela Paukner:

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Laura Barrera:

And I know you said you don't put anything in front of the crop like before planting, so can you just talk me through your nutrient management program for corn and how that has evolved to where it is today?

Dan Fohrman:

Right. So back when we used to run dry fertilizer, I started putting urea in the dry fertilizer mix where typically most guys will just put P and K and some other things in there. And the reason I did that was because I didn't like to go out and spread a bunch of urea out in front of planting because you never know what kind of year you're going to get. And then with the no-till, I didn't like a lot of compaction out in the field before we go out to plant and the tire track marks and all that stuff. I noticed there was singulation issues over the rows that we were running over the terrogator tracks. There's always nitrogen in the soil, it's just always, the bugs in the soil always make nitrogen, they just do.

So if you can get away from applying that salt right up front and just spoon-feed that crop, that's what I started doing on the home. From here we do our contests and now I do it on all my acres where I run that nitrogen on the planner, try to dump a lot on off on each side of the trench and you can see that in the photos I sent you where I'm putting the liquid out the back by the closing wheels. That way that plant has it when it needs it and if you get a bunch of rain, it's just going to go down through the soil profile and then get in our drinking water.

So I kind of went away from that type of thing where I'm loading the soil full of nitrogen. Because if you do your changing your ratios of nutrients too, if you put too much nitrogen in or anything that exchanges, everything changes a little bit. You can get your ratios off so bad that other nutrients aren't available. So I side dress with a dry fertilizer typically before the corn gets too much canopy that I can't get over it, I just pull a rig, spread it behind.

That seems that we're good, I get a lot of acres down and especially on the hillier stuff where you can't get in there with a sprayer to do wide drops or anything. And so the leveler ground I can get by with doing some wide drops, but the main nitrogen comes from the planter and then I go out and I usually do a pre-side dress nitrate test in different fields to see what kind of nitrogen levels I have before I side dress. And it always seems like it's a little bit less every year what I need to side dress.

Laura Barrera:

Oh, interesting. Okay. Do you think then that the plant is getting more nitrogen just naturally from the soil?

Dan Fohrman:

Right. The nitrogen is more available because of the biology is making it more available. Like the rye, you actually do sugars in the roots when it's growing and anytime there's sugar in there, it's going to ramp up your biology. So I'm trying to run where I got a crop rotation within my crop so that rye, it's always good to mix up your diversity for crop rotation. So by planting a rye every year in my corn and my beans, it's helping me to diversify without having to put a different crop in. That rye I think helps me a lot, it actually puts more phosphorus in the plant too. I'm able to use less phosphorus, less nitrogen and less potassium.

Laura Barrera:

Okay, interesting. And you said that you're doing the rye both after corn and soybean harvest?

Dan Fohrman:

Correct. Yep. A lot of people can get messed up on, they want that rye, the whole field to be green and tall when they go to plant their corn. That can be a real mess for guys. I know there's a lot of guys that tried that around here last year to get it to two feet so they could get payments from the soil water conservation, which is good that they're doing that. But what you want to do is you want to terminate that cover crop, you plant it green and terminate that cover crop where your corn is growing before your corn has to fight against that rye. Because if that rye starts taking the nitrogen in the sun and starts messing with that, you're losing yield.

But the beans, what I do is I let the beans come up and get to the third trifolia before I go out and terminate the rye on that. Beans actually do a little better if you pull some of that fertility away and put it into that cover crop and then give it to it later once that cover crop dies down and gets back into the soil.

Laura Barrera:

So do you ever plant your green into the rye or do you typically terminate it first?

Dan Fohrman:

No, I've been planting green for last two, three years now.

Laura Barrera:

Oh, okay, great. And do you feel that by waiting to terminate and doing that planting green, has that made a difference to your corn yields?

Dan Fohrman:

Well as long as it doesn't get out of control before you can get to it. I did have one 80 acre field last year that I run with the friend of the family Darrell, and that got out of control on us because we put some Turkey manure out there and some other stuff to try to boost that farm because it's really low in numbers. So that rye took off and we couldn't get to it. It was the last field I planted. And that field actually got hit pretty hard with the yield because it had to fight against that rye. But if you can terminate that rye when it's about six to eight inches before that corn is up, that way that corn doesn't get spindly. You don't want that corn to get spindly or have to fight against the rye or have it take the nutrients. But the beans, when you're in the beans, let that rye grow and then come back after you're all done planting and spraying and don't worry too much about the beans fighting with the rye.

Laura Barrera:

Yeah, see that's good to know that. I know that it's a concern that planting corn green, like you said, it can have those issues of having to compete with the rye or a little pathic effects with the rye. So it's good to know that as long as you're able to terminate it early enough, you haven't really seen any negative side effects.

Dan Fohrman:

I've never had a problem with germination. I know that was a big thing when I started doing this. I was really worried about it, but I talked to different guys across the country and none of them said they had problems with it. So I think it's more if you plant shallow seeds, like smaller seeds that are shallower in the seed soil depth where you'll have problems with the rye once you kill it, it could mess with your germination. But with corn or beans, I've never seen a problem with it.

Laura Barrera:

Yeah, okay, good to know. And speaking of seeding depth, I know, going back to the planter you mentioned that you're doing, you have AG Leader Technology on it and you're able to see the singulation row by row. Can you talk about the technology aspect to your operation and whether you feel that has had an impact on getting your corn yields to where they are today?

Dan Fohrman:

That AG Leader in Command 1200 is the monitor that I run. So there's one monitor in the tractor, which makes it really simple. It works well with other climate field view, stuff like that. It loads right off my tractor into the cloud, so it's there. That AG Leader, what I did to get that, what I started doing was so I could plant green because you couldn't see the markers out in the field and you know what you did at night and stuff like that. But the main reason, once I found out that I could do that and keep my row year after year, then I started to try to farm just that six-inch band. So I just shift a little bit off to the side so my press wheel wouldn't run on last year's stubble, whether it was corn or bean stubble, because it'd wear it out and stuff and it wouldn't be as smooth of a ride.

So I try to farm right in that same six inches instead of farming across it. You farm it vertically, you try to put your nutrients in there. So with dry fertilizer, what I did was I tried to pump that band up with dry fertilizer and then year after year it seemed like it just kept getting better. So I'm always planting in the same six inches, whether it's corn or soybeans. And that AG Leader works really well with row by row singulation. Because it'll show you if you've got one row that's not doing as good, you can get out and take a look at it, and what's going on there. Where before when I had the John Deere mind, I'd just tell you exactly what was going on with the whole planter. So you didn't know if you had one row that was off, or two rows, or half the planter.

Laura Barrera:

And going back to your contest plot in general, was there anything that you learned from last year that you're looking to apply going forward or anything that you're looking to experiment with because of something you saw?

Dan Fohrman:

Never give up on a crop. We were in a drought. We didn't get rain for almost 50 days and it's the driest summer we've ever had, I've ever seen. And a lot of farmers said, old farmer, they've never seen such a dry summer. The 40, 50 days without rain really made everybody nervous. The corn was wilting, it was really pineapple, it was starting to curl up and conserve energy and moisture. And yeah, that's the biggest thing. I wasn't even going to put in a corn grower contest. I said, well, shit, we ain't going to get nothing out of it. What's the point? But we did it anyways and it turned out to be the best yields we've had. So I guess the biggest thing is don't give up on your crop.

Laura Barrera:

What do you think made the difference for getting that yield to where it was in spite of that obstacle that that corn and dirt...?

Dan Fohrman:

Sure. I think a lot of it was the no-till and the cover crops. So when I did get the rain, it was able to soak in. Because anytime my water holding capacity is a lot higher than it has been in the past because of all them roots. Once that plant dies, that rye plant, there's that root system that decays down there and all that water will filtrate down in there. It seems like the soil's a lot cake-ier. I don't have any ponding out, my headlands even where we load semis and stuff, a lot of guys will go out and rip them headlands. I don't rip nothing. I leave it all and I just make sure I get a good rye crop on there to do my tillage, help with water infiltration.

And then that also helps with water holding capacity and you can hold more nutrients in your soil too and they're more available that way. And then weed suppression was a huge thing for rye. So this last year was kind of interesting, it was the first year I kind of screwed up when spraying herbicide and I put in half rates of pre with my burn down and I still didn't see any weeds out there. It was supposed to be so many quart, a quart and a half or something. I ended up putting a pint and a half. But with the dry year, I didn't see any weeds coming out. So there was actually spots in my contest field, the corn and in my bean field here at the house that I didn't put any post herbicide on after the crop was up and I had no weed. Without tilling the ground, it seems like the weeds don't show up and rye suppresses it so much.

Laura Barrera:

Right, yeah. I almost wonder, I feel like years ago I heard about the earthworms, like you said, you're seeing more earthworms showing up and I think they will eat weed seeds. So I don't know if that would be part of it or not, but that's interesting that you didn't have to apply a post herbicide because the weeds just weren't there.

Dan Fohrman:

Get it out of the field as fast as you can. We did our corn grower plots and then I had to pull over to a different farm and do some combining and we came back and there was a windstorm. And I had all these strips out in the field and it laid her down pretty good. But other than that, no, I mean there's always things you learn and things that you do a little differently. I guess the main thing is having your planter set up that way when it's time to go and conditions are good, you can hit the field and stay in the field.

Laura Barrera:

Yeah, yeah. I know you said that you take apart your planter every year. Is there any advice you would offer to other farmers on going through that process of making sure that their planter is set up as optimally as possible?

Dan Fohrman:

The biggest thing with no-till is make sure you don't have any play in your row units. Anytime you get a little bit of play in your row unit where it's moving in the ground, that seed will come down and bounce around in that seed tube and it could catch up to the one in front of it or it could make a space behind it, it could make a double. And your meter's working perfect, perfect singulation. By that row unit bouncing around in that seed tube being as long as it is, you can screw up a lot of things with not having your planner tightening set up right. And that's why I went with them. What are they, Precision Planning Solutions? That's where I got all them done from that Joe Hall at Planner Works.

So that's going to tighten up my planner and by what I spent, I just put the check in the mail day and I didn't want to write that check, but it'll probably pay for itself in one year. That's how fast a return. That's what my map tells me. By doing the roll by roll, taking it to yield melt in the field.

Laura Barrera:

I know you mentioned the different products that you've been putting out to improve your soil health and I'm just wondering if there are any, aside from the biologicals and the stuff, the products we already talked about, are there any other products that you've experimented with or have been using recently that have seemed to really help your corn yield that we haven't talked about?

Dan Fohrman:

Other than the stuff that I get from Monty's, they got really good humics and fulvics and sugars. I guess sugar is the biggest thing that I've been with the longest that it seems like it helps with the bugs too. I don't spray for bugs like the neighbors do where we all would have to spray at the same time for beans and stuff, every time I make a pass, I make sure I'm putting sugar in or humic or fulvic. And I think that really helps. Some people say the bugs can't metabolize sugar or something, so it kills them.

Laura Barrera:

Oh, interesting.

Dan Fohrman:

Or glucose.

Laura Barrera:

And when you say you're applying sugar, is it just granulated sugar like you'd buy at the grocery store?

Dan Fohrman:

No. No. And that's how I started doing it, but now that I run it on everything, I buy sugar in totes from Monty's or Concept AgriTek.

Laura Barrera:

Okay.

Dan Fohrman:

I get a little bit better deal, I'm in a MACC program, Midwest Advanced Crop Consulting. So once you're in that program you can get better deals on products like that from these companies. They give you a little kickback, which helps out a lot when you're buying quantities of product like that.

Laura Barrera:

And I know you mentioned a second ago about not having to spray at the same time that the neighbors are spraying and not having to deal with bugs like the neighbors are dealing with. Is there anything else that you think that you're doing that is unique from other farmers in your area that's really contributed to your corn yielding?

Dan Fohrman:

Some of the things I do that are different, when I do no-till a lot of people leave their corn stocks higher, they don't chop them down to the ground because they're worried about leaving too much of a mat over the soil. But I chop my corn stalks right down tight to the ground and I try to make it in bite-sized pieces. Because you know how it is to eat something that's bigger than your head, them bugs are tiny. Anytime you can chop up them pieces and get it started to turn over into fertilizer or nutrients for the next crop, you'll see the benefits of it, I think. That's one thing different that not a lot of guys do for no-till.

Laura Barrera:

What do you use to shred those corn stalks down?

Dan Fohrman:

Well, the one corn head that we got on Darrell's 12 row, he runs calmer rollers and choppers. Otherwise, on my combine, I just run the regular case, the rotary spinning chopping corn head.

Laura Barrera:

Oh, okay.

Dan Fohrman:

And I just run it really tight to the ground, as tight as I can get her without being in the dirt.

Laura Barrera:

Gotcha. Okay. And that hasn't been an issue for planting your rye cover crop then?

Dan Fohrman:

No, because see what I do is I either spin it over the top, I work with Unroot Cover Cropping did it for a couple of years for me where they can go out and do 300 acres on just an evening. With a spreader out the back of a tractor, a three-point hitch spreader. And then I just come through and I just lightly vertical till it with a turbo till from case, a 30 footer and it just shakes up the leaves enough, cuts up the stalks a little bit, doesn't disturb the root ball or the stalk that's left up, that six inch stalk. Doesn't pull that root system out. That's one thing I don't want to do is remove the old root system. I just want to try to shake that rye down underneath the fodder or trash and get that down underneath there so when we get the rain, that rye will come. It doesn't even have to be mixed in with dirt.

I was out in the field yesterday checking it and I got trials where I didn't do anything, it's a hundred percent no-till and that rye did start to come. It's just the roots grow right down through it and they're starting to get into the dirt. The only bad thing is I'm worried we might run out of moisture here, so some of that rye might die.

Laura Barrera:

So I want to just wrap up with this question here, which is, if a farmer asks you for advice on growing higher yielding corn, what would you tell them?

Dan Fohrman:

You got to start with the basics, pH, that's the hugest thing. You'd get people that want to dump all this money on a crop and think that it's going to produce more because they put on more nitrogen or they put on a bunch of humics or sugars and stuff. But if you don't have your pH set up at a seven, you're spending all that money for nothing, because nothing is available.

Get your pH straightened out, grid your ground, do a Haney test, figure out what your fungi to bacteria ratios are, and then do tissue sampling. I've been doing tissue sampling for almost 10 years, or it has been 10 years now. So then every year I go over my tissue samples in the winter and I compare them to the years before to see how I'm moving that needle of some of these microbes and map nutrients in the plant. Sometimes I think people worry too much about what they're putting in the soil and not worrying about what they're getting into the plant.

Laura Barrera:

And Dan, I know we've talked a lot about your corn today and your farm in general and the different things that you've done to really improve your corn yields. But is there anything else about your contest winning corn that we didn't talk about or just any final thoughts or comments you'd like to add that you think would be important for farmers to know?

Dan Fohrman:

Well, in order for things to change, you got to change your practices. You see a lot of people that want change, but they don't want to do a lot of work to get the change. And you got to be willing to be out in your fields a lot. I walk fields every day almost when I'm out on the farm. It's something I enjoy doing. But yeah, I change my program every year and you'd think, why in the hell would you change your program if you're getting 300 bushel corn? But I do, and it's worked for me. You got to change things if you want things to change. If you do the same thing over and over again, nothing's going to change.

Don't be afraid to get a little nervous and do stuff different than your neighbor. That's what got me to where I'm at and the yields that were getting out in the field, it was just experimenting. And my dad always said, you're your own scientist, nobody else is going to do it for you. You got to do it yourself and you got to be out there doing trials every time you can and working with stuff and trying to get yield without trying to spend a lot more money. It's nice when you can get that win-win by spending less and getting more.

Laura Barrera:

Right, yeah.

Dan Fohrman:

Not necessarily about how many bushels you put in a tank, it's what you put in the bank.

Laura Barrera:

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good distinction. And for someone who wants to take that approach of changing things up and experimenting, how do you decide what's going to be the next thing you try and focus on?

Dan Fohrman:

So you got to start out with tissue samples, but a lot of it that happened with me, I just started networking with people, other growers that I was interested in ended up going to the Commodity Classic with some farmers from the area, they took me down there. And once I went down there and we started talking to all these guys and these DEKALB guys and all this stuff, there was a lot of knowledge down there and I learned a lot of things.

So the more you can network and think with like-minded people that are good at what they do, it'll rub off on you. So that's this MACC Group, Midwest Advanced Crop Consulting has been really good. These guys, I can call Terry Vissing, he's a no-till wizard and he'll answer the phone right now and I can ask him a question and I'll get what I need. And that's the biggest thing, is having people that have done this stuff to give you some advice.

That's why I'm not afraid to tell people I like working with farmers and enjoy seeing what other people do. There's a lot of ways to skin a cat and there's a lot of ways to get corn to grow. It's just everybody's got a different way of doing it. And sometimes you learn stuff by other ways people are doing things. You got to try different stuff.

Michaela Paukner:

Thanks to Dan Fohrman and Laura Barrera for today's conversation. If you want more advice on raising high-yield, no-till corn, check out No-Till Farmer's latest special report unlocking your corn's yield potential.

It's available for free on the web page for this podcast, which you can access at no-tillfarmer.com/podcasts. Many thanks to the Overpass lineup by the Andersons for helping to make this No-Till podcast series possible. From all of us here at No-Till Farmer, I'm Michaela Paukner. Thanks for listening.