Time now for a good old fashioned Farmer Feature. Let’s head out to Lewiston, Minn., to catch up with longtime no-tiller Luke Miller.

We joined him in the cab as he harvested triticale in early June. Miller grows feed for his 700 cows. And he has a pretty unique rotation. Luke, tell us about it.

“One thing that we’re doing that’s unique is we’re double cropping. Our rotation is corn silage, seeded triticale following corn silage. We harvest triticale in spring and then double plant to soybeans.”

“After the corn silage harvest, we come in with a Great Plains drill with 7.5 inch spacing, seeding 100 pounds of triticale per acre. After the crop is harvested in spring, we no-till soybeans in 15-inch rows with a Kinze planter.”

“This is just something that we’ve been experiencing. The last couple years, the protein count of our triticale has been down a little bit in the 13% range when it used to always be in 16%. We don’t know if that’s just because it’s getting diluted or we’ve been shorting iut on nitrogen. This last year, when we seeded we put down 50 pounds of urea to see if we couldn’t get the protein content of the triticale to increase.”

“We actually just got done, this is our last triticale harvest of the year. We’re putting it in this bunker here. We’re just pushing it in, packing it down and covering it with plastic later this afternoon.”

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