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Welcome to the latest edition of the No-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. I'm John Dobberstein, senior editor of No-Till Farmer. In this episode of the No-Till Farmer Podcast, visionary farmer, Michael Horsch explains how he and his family embark cultural norms on conservation practices to farm 55,000 acres in Germany and the Czech Republic. During his historic talk at the national No-Tillage Conference, horse shares how he built an equipment manufacturing base that can better utilize his visionary practices. He also discusses his unique global perspective on conservation, agriculture and precision technology in factors shaping the future of farming.

Almost 44 years ago, I started a company which is called Horsch. It was not my initial intention actually, because I'm coming off a farm in Southern Germany where I still live on a home farm with four more brothers and a sister, and I'm the oldest. And all my four other brothers are just as aggressive as I was that we wanted to become farmers and hated animals. We only wanted farm lots of land. Well, the story of our company and division of our company actually starts not with me. It starts with a generation of my father and uncles back in the mid-'60s.

In the mid-'60s, there was a time after the Second World War building up Germany, and lots of bigger farms, estate farms that had lots of labor. Labor walked away and went into the industry because the industry was searching for people. So, they were left with no people to run the farms. And so, at the end of the day, those dukes and lords gave up farming and rented out or sold out their land. So, that was a chance of my father and uncles that came already from a rather big farm where they grown up, but there's only one that could take over the farm from his father. So, they then went out in the early '60s to mid-'60s renting quite a bit of land and some of it bought. Most of it's some crappy land similar to what you have, because the reason you're so good is because you have crappy land, Russell. That's the reason. Because if you have nothing then boys silt, you wouldn't think like this, like you're, because you don't have to.

Anyway, I have a similar experience with my father and uncles when they took some crappy land, lots of rocks and heavy soils and so on. Well, to make a long story short, they didn't think that the plow was a good idea. Just if you had a couple thousand acres to farm, not each of them, but together in those days, which was huge. Plowing was just a cotton picking job. I mean, you didn't get anything don., and even though we had done plowing, you start picking rocks before you start seeding. So, I said, we got to stop all this. The researchers said and the extension service said, "This is not going to work. You have to plow your land, otherwise your yields come down and you grow weeds." Then they said, "Well, we're going to do it ourselves and we'll figure it out."

So, just imagine me as a young boy. I'm one of the oldest in my generation, so we grew up between uncles and my father becoming pioneers and helping each other to figure out how this is going to work. So, always Sunday's after church, we went out with father and uncles to one of our fields of our uncles, and just checking out what he's done and what they've done, and everybody's given everybody else's advice. You should try this, you should try that, and you should do it this way and you should do it that way. So, we were basically myself, my brothers and my brothers and cousins, we were injected with a pioneer spirit in those days. I hated school already very early when I got to school, so I didn't take very long to get out of school, so I didn't learn much. And secondly, I want to become a farmer and farm lots of land, and I hated animals. And I knew already that those days the machinery need to farm without the plow, which is not there, we basically have to figure it out ourselves how to build.

I did know that I could build a company out of this. This was not my initial intention though. But anyway, me being the oldest and dropping out of school really early, and my mother already told me, "You probably you should become a truck driver because that's all you can do because you didn't learn much," with the age of 17, I came here to the States because I always dreamed about to become a farmer in Iowa because I hear about this corn growers and this straight corn growers and on. Well, it didn't take me very long in the late '70s to find out that you don't need me here either. Plus I didn't have any money, but I learned a lot, quite a bit here.

So, I went back home in 1980, '81 with the intention of making some money and trying to figure out to get some money, then go back maybe to the States, or Canada, whatever, and buy a farm there. Because I have four more brothers. They wanted to take the home farm, so what can you do? I had always this idea about a no-till seeder, which we always talked about in the family, and with uncles, and father, and so on and so on. And I said, "You know what? Now that I'm back home, I'd like to build one." And my father said, "Hey, go just take the workshop. Just go ahead and build one." My uncle found out that I was working on the seeder and he said, "Build me also one." Another uncle said, "Oh, build me also one." So, I had three orders 1981, I never built a machine in my lifetime. Well, I screwed around. It was the gas hacks, and with the welder and this rot welders, and I knew how to burn a drill bit and so on. So, I learned this, but that was about it.

So, anyway, that's our home farm. This is a house where we still live in. It used to be an estate farm, farm owned by dukes and lords before my father got ahold of it in 1968. And so, this is where the narrow is. This is the workshop of the farm of my father's where I started to build my first seeders in 1981. [inaudible 00:05:43] work? Yeah, it works. This is what it looked like in 1981, my first seeder. Well, the thing kind of worked because my family is quite big and my uncles are just as crazy as my father was, and they say, "Oh, just continue this. This is a good idea."

Well, anyway. Basically we were into no-till in those days. The seeder itself, we would call it today, a maximum disturbance no-till seeder. Well, don't ask me whether this is the right thing or not. It's just, anyway, this is how we get started. And I thought, oh, I was 21 years old when I built this. So, I said, "Hey, I have a way to make money. And if my uncle's buy it and father buys it, there should be other people to buy it." It didn't take me very long to find out that nobody wanted it. So, I got stuck again.

Another problem we had, the biggest tractor available in those days was a John Deere 4430 or 4440, which we imported straight from the United States because we didn't have them in Europe. And in those days you could still screw around with a screwdriver on the injection pump and just if there was not enough horsepower, you could just turn it up. This is what it did. It didn't take very long to blew up an engine. Uncle also blew up an engine and said, "Well, what we going to do?" One guy told me, "You have to build a smaller machine." I said, "Never going to ever build a smaller machine. I won't [inaudible 00:07:10] even bigger yet." So, we have to have our own tractor. So, there's no bigger tractor available. So, I bought my first tractor in 1983.

And it was a three wheel tractor, three wheel drive with 180 degrees steer in the front, so it would turn like a sear turn lawnmower on the headlands, flip the whole thing around with a seed tank and a fertilizer tank in the back. So, it was the first self-built seeder. I mean, if I took this thing to farm shows or field demos, my booth was always full of people. Nobody bought. I mean, how stupid can one be to have a startup company, invent something nobody needs? Nobody's interested in? Everybody wants to look at it, but never buy it. So, I was stuck.

If I didn't have a strong family behind me that says, "I'm going to keep going. We'll finance you. We'll help you. We'll buy some equipment we need of you and keep on going, keep on going. Stay on track," I wouldn't be here. Well, then we went on. First I have to finish this before I go to the next step. Then well, everything we needed, we couldn't buy. The sprayers in those days were far too small and it was all pool type stuff. So, we decided we needed bigger sprayers. So, we got in the sprayer business. So, we built ourselves the first self-propelled sprayer in 1989. So, every single piece of equipment, even today you see from our company, most of those pieces of equipment are first built for our own farming still today, before we go out and try to sell it to you. So, we don't actually ask you guys what you want, we tell you what you should want.

In those days, my most important marketing tool is just because I was desperate. I tried to sell something nobody wanted. So, you have to figure out a different way of marketing it. Well, my most marketing tool was a spade. So, what did I do? First of all, I had to always approach big customers, big farmers. Where I come from in Southern Germany, the average farm size in the early '80s was maybe 20 acres. So, if you had a thousand acres, that was huge. So, there wasn't very many, many thousand acre farmers around me. So, I had to go to France, I had to go to England and so on to find some big estate farmers that had problems with plows, they had problems with heavy soils, problems with rock picking and so on, where we invited them to come to our farm or to my uncle's farm, and the first thing they wanted to see is not the machine, they wanted to see the fields. They wanted to see what happens in a field that they haven't plowed for 15 years.

So, how do you show it to them? Well, you take a spade and move a couple of yards of soil before you may sell a piece of equipment. And obvious, at the end of the day, the guy then said, "Well, I might as well look at the piece of equipment as well because I may be interested in it. I also need the machine to do it." So, this is how we got into the farm machinery business. And in a way still, with this desperate way of marketing with the spade, in a way we still do it today.

Then another thing happened, talking to earthworms. I mean one of the reasons nobody in the '80s or really hardly any farmer in the '80s was interested in a non-plow based farming system is, I mean, how can it ever work? Soil needs to be moved, soil needs to be loosened, soil needs to be warmed up, and blah, blah, blah, blah. This is why we need the plow. This is why we have to get mad at our soils. Well, anyway. In the late '70s, there was a local agricultural institute coming to my father and my uncles, and I asked them, "Well, when we heard that the whole family was trying to make a no-till system or non-plow based system work in the '60s, we were all betting the next five years there's lots and lots of land available from the horses because they won't make it. Now you're still there, but we can't explain why a non-plow based system in growing cereal crops can work, because we have no scientific proof for that. Can we actually go and take some of your fields and do trials?"

So, they took three different sites, two of my uncles and one of my father, and made a 10-year trial where they took in the middle of a field, one acre, they plowed like it should be, one acre, the minimum till and mixed with a chisel plow about 10 inches deep, and one acre they wanted us to farm the way we farmed the last 15 years or 20 years, which was mainly basically no-till and just moving more than an inch or an inch and a half soil. So, after 10 years when they finished this trial, they did lots of trial, yield tests and whatsoever, and soil tests and blah, blah, blah, blah.

There was a professor coming around, Professor [inaudible 00:11:46], he has now died with a couple of students. He was a microbiologist and he was basically trying to do earthworm counts. And the way he did it is don't tell it anybody. When you check form [inaudible 00:12:00], you know what this is? When you smell it just makes you go cry. You pour it in the ground. And then so he popped out the earthworms. They're dead obviously after that. But anyway, every jar is a square yard, square meter, it's about the same. And what he found basically after 10 years of doing trial work on no-tilt ground, there was no-tilt for 15 years before they started to do the trial work. In the bottom, this is what they said it's supposed to be. This is the best way, the best practices plowing the soil. This is for every square yard, how much earthworms they found. Then in intensive min-till, this is what they found. The earthworm population doubled. But taking the plow out and just did last tillage, but still mixing. Then when we went to low-tilt, they doubled again.

This was 1988. Guess what? For me, that was the proof. I went out and said, "here, I got the proof now from the Munich Agricultural University, they're telling me that that's what we was doing for the last 15, 20 years is the right way of farming. Stop plowing. It's a stupid thing. Stupid thing you can't do. Here is the proof. The earthworms do all the work." The problem was, again, not everybody wanted to believe it, even though it's a proof. And to be honest to you, I mean the earthworm, bringing the earthworm population up, there's a direct relationship between microbiological activity, and so on, and on and on. But there is not a direct increase in yield. And I mean you double the amount of earthworms means you double the amount of yield is not quite true. So, it took me another 20 years to understand what really works and how to really convince farmers to make change of their practices and so on.

So, anyway, this is giving you a heads-up of how we got started in the '80s. I mean, it's a very, very crude way. Don't try to copy it to try to start a manufacturing company, because it's the most complicated and most foolish way to get going. Now I'm jumping forward. Fast-forward, today, I'll show you where we are. 1990, you know what happened? Well, we probably don't know what happened in Europe. 1990 was when the iron wall went down. When the Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union fell apart and overnight, basically all the Eastern European countries like Poland, East Germany, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Russia opened up. Because of communist system, it was all corporate farms, big farms. So, this was just like a kid in a candy shop for me because I didn't have to go less than hundred miles, 50 miles away, I was in Eastern Bloc country, Czech Republic, East Germany. And all of sudden lots, lots of big farms, cooperative farms that wanted to get out of the Russian crappy equipment and they wanted to basically have some western stuff.

So, they even started to believe me with my earthworm popular theory and so on, non-plow based system. I said, it doesn't matter what it is. As long as it comes from west, it's got to be good. So, this was basically a new start of our company in 1990, because before it was just the family didn't keep me going, I wouldn't be here. So, anyway, from 1990 on, we grew every year and never stopped until today. We moved all over the world and so on. And we're still doing what we're doing today. We're farming in a bigger way today than we do farming in the '80s, '70s and '80s. And we still develop mainly equipment for ourselves first before we then go out and tell you what you should have. Not necessarily means that it always right.

Today we are seeding, planting, spraying, and tillage company. Obviously we don't have a plower in our plower range. When it comes to seeding, we're probably bigger than even John Deere by revenue worldwide because we're everywhere. 70% of our seeders we sell is all no-till in Australia, in South America, in Russia, Ukraine, and whatsoever. Planting, we're probably number three in the world now or number four, we'll be growing on the planting side. Spraying, we're definitely number one in Europe now and we're growing fast all over the world, too. And tillage, when it comes to minimum tillage, I think nobody can keep up with us in terms of all... I don't even keep up with myself anymore because I don't know what we all got anymore in terms of chisel, plow type, [inaudible 00:16:30] type, tillage equipment, compact discs, you name it, we've got everything. Because every market we move in, we need different tools and different things to cope with the problems the way the farmers want to work this well, don't want to work this well.

We'll come back to the episode in a moment, but first I'd like to thank our podcast sponsor, Yetter Farm Equipment. Yetter Farm Equipment has been providing farmers with solutions since 1930. Today, Yetter is your answer for finding the tools and equipment you need to face today's production agriculture demands. The Yetter lineup includes a wide range of planter attachments for different planting conditions, several equipment options for fertilizer placement and products that meet harvest time challenges. Yetter delivers a return on investment and equipment that meets your needs and maximizes inputs visit them at Yetterco.com.

Well, I want to talk a little bit about farming in Europe right now to give you maybe a little bit of a heads-up and understanding, especially west of Europe. What we are up against, which is in somewhat totally different to what you are up against, especially here in the corn belt. First of all, what is a classic rotation comparing it with the corn belt in most parts of Western Europe? France, England, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Poland, whatever. 50% in a arable farm that's only farming cereals or common crop, mostly 50% of the main crop, what is corn for you or soybean for you. For us is winter wheat. Winter wheat we are into a hundred bushel is a low yield. 180 bushel is quite good. So, we're really good because we have the climate, we have the temperatures, cooler temperatures you have and so on, which is good for wheat, which is not so good for corn. So, we grow much higher yields in wheat than you would do actually here.

Second-biggest crop, which would be the equivalent to use soybeans is winter rape, which is 7090 bushel acre, and then probably 10% in most of the farm. Not all of the farm, but 10% is corn or something. Corn either for grain or for silage. And if we talk 150 bushel, this is quite a good yield. Then if we talk 200 bushel, which we achieved on two of our farms this year, it's huge for us. And that's where you even start talking. I mean it's a crop failure for most of you guys, 200 bushel, I know that. Average. And now here we come where we are. Our average yearly temperature in most parts of Europe is around 45 Fahrenheit, which is not that warm really. That tells you also why we are not so much into corn and soybeans, and more into winter wheat and winter rape.

Most of the year is the rainfall is around 20 to 24 inches, so it's not that high either. And now this is where I want to get at. 75% and most of the farms in Western Europe. Europe is seeded in fall, not in spring. So, cover crop, you need time. Where's the time for cover crop? There's not much time. Winter wheat in most parts of Western Europe is between 10 and 11 months in the field. So, by the time we harvest it and then we seed it again, there's only one month or two months in between. And also rapes is even worse, winter oil seed rape. Sometimes we have the seeder, the oil seed rapeseed are going the same time we harvest it. It can be 12 months in the field. 12 months to worry about a crop. I mean you have six months to go to Florida and go to hunting and whatever. We don't have time for that. And here is where the biggest difference between you guys and us when it comes to... especially in the corn belt, and it comes to farming practices, and what works and what doesn't work.

Our biggest problem is, well, you talked about this CN ratio. What CN ratio do? I mean CN ratio in residue. I mean you should know the CN ratio of soybean stocks is about 30, 30 to 35 to one. Corn stocks is about 45 to 50 to one. Winter wheat residue, the way the varieties using, the way we shorten it with hormones and whatsoever, is up to a hundred to one. So, what is the difference from the decomposing engine, from the macro biological activity or from the decomposes in the soil, between residue from a hundred to one CN ratio, to a residue between 30 to 50 to one? What is the biggest difference? Well, it's very simple.

I make a simple analogy. You have two dogs, one you feed with meat and the other one you feed with bones. Which one is growing faster? What is easier to digest? And it's exactly the same for the decomposing engine. If you feed your micro biological activity in the soil with a CN ratio like soybean stocks or corn stocks of 30 to 50 to one, it's like feeding dogs with meat. If you try to feed them with winter wheat residue straw at a hundred to one, it's like feeding dogs with bones. You know how long it takes to chew on this stupid bone to get it cracked up, and to get it dissolved and to get it break and mineralized? It takes too long.

So, our biggest problem is, especially at the high yields. If we're a hundred bushel or 80 bushel wheat, it wouldn't be as complicated. But if you go to a 150, 160 or 180 bushel of wheat and have only one month in between, it's not enough for the decomposing engine to chew the stuff up or even wetten it. So, to cycle nutrition from the previous residue, you actually have to help it. That's the only way we can actually grow this high yields and get a rotation going. This is the biggest difference to where you are, where we are.

So, how do we do it? Well, residue sizing is king. The biggest breakthrough in growing high winter wheat yields, which is the main crop in Western Europe. You know what it is, what it was? Big more horse-bound combines and bigger choppers. A cloth combine is one of the best combines you can buy in Europe right now, because it's a European company and they concentrate on heavy wheat crop. That spec combine cloth sells in Europe, they don't sell here. The chopper they sell here, it's a chopper with only half of the amounts of knives in there and whatever and less horsepower. It's only horsepower and lots and lots of knives, and lots and lots of belts on the drive from the engine down to the chopper, to chop down to size residue. If you don't start with that, you can never grow 180% wheat because you cannot return the residue. You cannot cycle the nutrition which are left over in the residue.

So, we actually learned this the last 20, 25 years. And this is where I did many, many spade turns with farmers in the '90s where we talked about residue management, residue sizing from farmers that want to go from a plow-based system into a minimum till-based system or sometimes even no-till-based farming system, how to deal with this growing yields and growing amounts of residue of a CN ratio of hundred one.

And the second thing is, I mean my combine drivers, they hate me. Because if I see a combine driver raising up the header more than four inches off the ground in 180% wheat, he's dead. He's off the combine and I don't want to see him anymore again, because every inch counts. Every inch of straw stubble you put through the combine, it gives you a chance that you recycle it much quicker, that you decompose it much quicker and you have the nutrition quicker back for the next crop you put in the field. So, stubble height is another thing. This is a stubble of 160, 180 bush of wheat. This is one of our own farms. This is another special tillage tool which we use in our own farms. We don't sell many of them, but we mainly use them for ourselves because farmers think it's something else is better.

The next thing is spreading straw. You can't do whatever you want at this amount of straw up to 10 tons, whatever this is in your language, I don't know, you calculate it yourself. Per acre, per hectare. This chopper will never spread it perfectly. So, you always have to go in an angle and you to have have a special tillage tool which has only ten, six inches, seven inches spacing, six ranks to drag the straw along and not only spread it, also level the soil and mix it in. And if you don't mix it in so that decomposers can get a hold of it as quick as possible, we can't get the quick decomposing going and it takes a little too long again. If we put no-till into this, we can no-till into this. But our yields from that crop with no-till into this would be a lot less, unless we're not speeding up the decomposing process, just because of these stupid CN ratio, which is far too wide for what we try to do.

And then we are using a couple tillage passes, especially at US high yield areas. So, we use this tool maybe twice and then we have a chisel part with little wider spacing. We go a little bit deeper before we then go into seeding. But at the end of the day, it's all about enhancing, speeding up, decomposing to make the dog's feed bones. That's all it is. Eat bones, not feed them. Another thing I want to talk about, because since we're doing business all over the world and I get to travel, this is a nice thing for me. I get to travel all over the world a couple times a year for the last 30 years. I dealing with the biggest farmers in the world in Australia, in South America, in North America, in Russia, Ukraine. But it's not so easy right now because of the war, and most parts of Western Europe and so on, Western Canada. And it's quite interesting what we run into. And we see this also at home in our own farms and in our own areas, in our own way place in Western Europe as well.

What we see in no-till and min-till what becomes a bigger and bigger general problem is phosphorus. Phosphorus is the one macro element which doesn't move in the soil. Where it's sitting, it's sitting. As soon as it's available, the root has to grow there to get a hold of it. It's not get flushed to the roots like nitrogen gets. It's [inaudible 00:27:55]. And what we see now and what we get, and what scientists tell us, and crop consultants tell us all over the world, mainly actually in Brazil and Australia, we have the biggest talk about this. And if we in min-till systems in Europe see the same thing, the higher the yields are going, the more we fertilize our soils, we raise the level of available phosphorus in the first two three inches, but we start to automatically decrease the phosphorus deeper down 10, 20 inches.

And you don't see that if you have enough moisture and it rains every day when you need it. You only see this problem when you get heat [inaudible 00:28:43], especially with climate change, when you get heat waves coming in or extensive drops. That the majority of the root system eventually starts ending up in the first four, to five to 10 inches and it's less roots going down. So, because especially no-till, you don't do anything about... this is why some guys say, "Oh, you should be start plowing again. Just plow it under." Stupid me. I would never do that. So, what can you do?

I told you I didn't go much to school, but I learned a few things from real good scientists. And probably one of the most important learnings I had with one of a very famous plant scientists in Germany, he's long dead now. This was about 30 years ago. Well, we always hold conferences on our sites similar to this. And I had this was one professor there as a speaker. He was already in his early '80s.

And he took me in the side after his speech and said, "Son, I'm going to teach you something. Every single seed you put in the ground, it doesn't matter what it is, is looking for the same environment. First, the first radical that comes out of a seed only goes down, never goes up and looks for the moonshine, it goes down. Secondly, and this is the most important, for maximum root growth, you have to understand that every single plant, every single seed of a plant is looking for the same environment it wants to grow in. It is looking for continuous soil density increase. Continuous soil density increase, down into the site and that enables a plant to continue growing root systems."

A sudden soil density change is the worst what you can deliver to any kind of a plant. What is a sudden soil density change? Well, the most classic certain soil density change in our part of the world is a plow pan. As soon as there's a sudden change in soil density, I didn't say whether it's too tight or too loose, it can be both ways. It's no good for a growth. And the other thing is, especially in strip-till, you got to be careful. If you have a loose part, a loose tunnel or a ditch, this is loose. So, the plant is growing to grow in there and as soon as touching the sidewalls is saying, "Hey, this is a little bit, this is something soil density change, I should not go. I should go fill it down." So, the reason for a plant to put where it starts moving its roots, it's going after soil density changes. And if there's a continuous increase, it'll grow everywhere unless it gets too tight.

But another thing is an air pocket. If you have an air pocket in there like strip-till or like we do with this focus on whatsoever, same thing. An air pocket. Once it hits an air pocket, it stops. To lose. There's no reason why you should grow your [inaudible 00:31:56] . This is probably the best lesson I ever learned from a plant pathologist and a soil scientist in my life. Every time I put a seed in the ground, every time I do tillage, every time I think about this and I realize he was damn right. Don't forget that. Whatever practices you use, always understand the seed and the first radical [inaudible 00:32:18] come out, he wants to find a continuous increase in soil density. If it's too loose, it's no good. If it's too tight, it's no good. If sudden changes happen, it's no good at all. To the side and downwards.

It's interesting. In Brazil where you have the longest [inaudible 00:32:38], not really longest, but the most intensive no-till going on, there's not even any trash whippers or whatever. They won't always resonate on the surface [inaudible 00:32:47]. There, we have more or more customers, more and more crop consultants tell us, "Hey, we need tools to get phosphors down deeper than six, seven or 10 inches, because we are lacking phosphors. We have too much in the surface and not enough down because we can't get the root systems to grow down there anymore." So, this is a product we specially built for Brazil and we sell them by the hundreds now. Quite good product. But again, now coming back to the lesson I learned from this scientist, this is what's most important when you do something like this, even the strip-till, maximum consolidation. To get as close as possible to this continuous increase in soil density everywhere in the cross-section of the root zone.

That's the key. Not the point and the time, how you open it, and then you just throw the soil in there, and just touch it a little bit and say this is enough. No, it's going to be tight. Otherwise, the root system has no reason, not a real reason to grow into the sides where it's cooler and tighter or down. A little thing I want to end this lesson here with you guys, but I have one more thing I want to show you afterwards if you want, is seed placement. Best seed placement. Since I'm building seeders, any kinds of seeders for the last 45 years myself in our company, obviously seed placement was always a big issue for us and still is today. And if I could give you a lesson about seed placement, what I learned in 45 years, would take two hours. So, I'm not going to start there.

But I want to give you one little thing. You know what the biggest problem, especially in seeders is? In plants we don't have that, but in seeders, it's staggered rows. Can you imagine how many miles, hundreds of miles I walked behind seeders, and was on my knees, and had dirty fingernails and my wife was showing me, "What have you done again? Because your fingernails are dirty," looking for the seed and so on. And every time I've done it, I've sensed something. Staggered, especially when you go down to say 10 inches, or 15 inches or five inches rows, you have to stagger rows all over the block. There's always a difference in seed placement and seed environment between the front rows and the second row [inaudible 00:35:08].

So, I've always seen that. And then even on our own farms, now we're saying most of the seeders we're using is also for grain seeders. We rather go away from five inches, we go to six, seven, eight inches or 10 inches rows only for one reason, to keep all the [inaudible 00:35:28] the same length, one rank. When it comes to precision seed placement, guys, this is one of the keys. It's so simple. You should have walked a couple hundred miles with me after seeders, I've done the last 45 years, you would learn that, too. It's so simple. I hate staggering rows because there's always an influence, especially when you speed up the machine, because the one front row becomes a snow plow and plows soil in front of the second row behind. And there's always different seed environments.

This is a good thing about a planner, especially when you 15 inches, 20 inches, 30 inches apart. Autonomy has always been intriguing to me ever since I had my first auto track system with RTK. I bought it in California in 2001 from AutoFarm. It was with two antennas and so on. And every time when I had this first system on one of our farms, I said, "Well, we got to build robots. We got to build robots." This was already 25 years ago almost, or 24 years ago. So, I was thinking about it, did some drawings, built some stuff over the years and so on. Today we built lots of different crazy things.

I show you just two projects I've been working on for many. This is one of the projects. This is a complete system. This is a 60-foot planter, a robot planter with a truck system and loading. So, logistics is there, seed fertilizer, everything is a complete system by itself. A one-man show. And this is six or seven years old now, this video clip. Fantastic project. Took us a couple of years to get the software going, path planning tools and what's ever, and all this, blah, blah, blah. And even the filling is a one-man show and everything is just perfect. It worked just perfect. Guess what? We stopped it a year ago because it's useless. It's absolutely useless. You only find out when you do it.

You know why it's useless? What's the sense of having a power unit like this in front of a seeder like this and make it go autonomous? When you find out that shit just happens, a root ball catches in, the closing wheels drags seed out, so you got to be there anyway. You got to be there anyway. So, I want the biggest possible unit, not a small unit, the biggest possible unit to be there anyway, so might as well have a tractor with a cab on and drive it autonomously and sleep in there. So, we stopped it. It's useless. It's absolutely useless. It's absolutely useless. But it takes a while to find out because you get so excited about it. This is an opposite project. That project is the most useless autonomous project I ever started. It's the simplest machine I ever built. This is a small version. It's an 80 footer. Now we built 120 footer of it. It's a very simple autonomous no-till seeder for soybeans and corn, mainly right now for Brazil up north.

This thing is so stupid, darn simple, no-till. You always need down pressure on the coulters. The wider you go, the wings come out. Do you know that? Here, it doesn't happen because you got all the weight on top and you have hydraulic systems to push it out. Here, this is a prototype. A year later we had to put a cab on because a test driver hated this to get stitched up by mosquitoes, so he needed a place to sit in there and sleep. There's a steering wheel, just to sit there and sleep. But you would always have to be around because this shit happens. There's a wild boar dug a hole in there, gets in there and gets plugged up, or a combine stops and puts up a whole pile of sleeping stocks, and you drive into it and the whole row unit just blocks up. So, what are you going to do when you're not there? So, autonomy at the end of the day only works when you are there.

So, now people are talking about multiple units to walk behind. You know what was the biggest invention in crop farming in the last 50 years? I'm old enough to know it. The first sound grab cab of John Deere with an air conditioner, that was the biggest thing that ever had come up around because I grew up with a John Deere 4020 with a sunroof on. I hate it, when you sit there on 18 hours a day. Some of you guys should know it.

Now the young guys don't even know this, what it's like when you sit in that cab with Michael Jackson on the radio and whatsoever, and sit there and talk to the girlfriend all time the phone, and you get off the tractor after 12 hours, you don't even have to take a shower. And so, now we want little 10 foot robots, 10 of them walk behind them because shit just happens out in hot... in the dirt of the dust. We're going back to the old days. Guys, where are we? If autonomy works, it only works that there's always somebody there. It's just in case something happens. And build the biggest possible unit so it's as productive as it can be. That makes sense.

That's it for this episode of the No-Till Farmer Podcast. We'd like to thank Michael Horsch for sharing all of his interesting stories and insight behind his company and conservation ag trends in Europe. We also want to thank our sponsor, Yetter Farmer Equipment, for helping to make this podcast possible. A transcript of this episode and our archive of previous podcast episodes are both available at notillfarmer.com/podcasts. For Michael Horsch and our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm John Dobberstein. Thanks for listening. Keep on no-tilling and have a great day.