Staying in California for the Video of the Week. West Coast strip-till and no-till pioneer Tom Barcellos checks in with an up-close look at his planter.

“This is our 1710 John Deere MaxEmerge planter. What you see in California is a 3-point integral planter that’s drawn. We have smaller fields. We don’t have these vast, large fields where we can run 20-30 rows. 10-row, 30-inch. We also have an 8-row 30. We use the same fertilizer attachments as much as we can on our equipment, so we don’t have to carry a large parts inventory. You’ll notice there’s no row cleaner here because we don’t have a lot of that top residual. We run fertilizer, wavy coulter, and we have some good downpressure springs. The downpressure springs do a good job in the strip-till area. When we do no-till, it’s critical, the moisture in the soil because sometimes we don’t have a lot of organic matter in that top 2-3 inches where we want to have that seed placement. The wavy coulter does a good job of opening the soil, but you don’t want it to be dry enough so that it doesn’t seal well. We’ve used some Schlagel finger closers before. Typically, we do 95-98% strip-till now, so we kind of got away from that.”

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