One field we harvested this year reminded me of the importance in no-till of clearing residue away from the row to get the best stands.

Cleaning residue away from the seedbed area really paid off in our soybean stands this year. Using two different styles of coulter-row cleaner combinations with Kinze 3000 series row units on two different planters, we saw a 3- to 5-bushel difference in yields in fields with very heavy, unprocessed corn stalk residue.

Normally we wouldn’t have an opportunity to do this type of comparison, but last year we added another planter to our farming operation. With varying residue conditions, we got an opportunity to see how the performance of the coulter-row-cleaner systems worked in varying residue conditions.

Opportunity Arises.

 This difference didn’t show up on all fields, but occurred whenever we had to partially raise up the row cleaner on one planter because it was plugging in our 20-inch rows.

Normally we don’t have to raise our residue wheels because we use knife rolls on our corn head. But this year we rented some new land and the stalks on that farm were harvested with a combine that had traditional stalk rolls rather than knife rolls, so the stalks were long and unprocessed.

One of the planters is a 24-row Kinze 3700 set to 20-inch spacings, and the other is a 12-row Kinze 3700 toolbar planter on 20-inch spacings, mounted on a Yetter 6300 caddy. Both planters have identical Kinze 3000 Series row units with…