After seeing the damage caused by tillage on his home farm in Austria, Eduard Zehetner decided to try no-till on his Hensall, Ontario, farm in the early 1990s. While he was able to make no-till soybeans and winter wheat work, no-till corn was a struggle.

He then tried strip-tilled corn for several years, but his son, Stefan, says it was also a struggle. Back then they didn’t have GPS so in the spring they had a difficult time finding the fall strips. It was a shank-type strip-till unit, which worked in spring on their loam soils but smeared their heavy clay soils.

So the Zehetners then moved to minimum-tilled corn, which is what they’re still doing today.

“That’s where we’re at right now,” Stefan says. “Really shallow tillage ahead of corn just to get it warmed up a little bit and plant into that.”

Now with RTK technology and coulter-style strip-till units available, the Zehetners say strip-till would probably work on their farm, but are hoping to be able to skip this step on their quest of becoming 100% no-till.

“We’re planting right on the edge of the berm — we tried it again this year and it’s not really ideal,” Stefan says. “Side by side data only showed a 3- to 4-bushel-per-acre advantage between strip-till and no-till in to soybean stubble, but it was a very dry spring.”

The Zehetners have been using a Vaderstad disc, which works the top inch of soil like vertical tillage. Stefan says this…