If you’re going to make strip-till work, Steve Cubbage warns you, first of all, that it isn’t for the “faint of heart.”

He first got involved with precision agriculture in the mid-90s on his family’s 2,200-acre Nevada, Mo., farm. Feeling that local suppliers and dealers weren’t doing a good enough job of servicing and putting together precision concepts, Cubbage learned from his own field trials and tribulations and started his own business called Record Harvest.

“I can still tell you today that this precision business is not easy,” Cubbage told attendees of the 16th annual National No-Tillage Confer-ence last January. “You certainly need somebody who has been down that path, and has been there and done that, so you don’t hopefully make the same mistakes that we did when we first got started.”

There are four main pieces to the strip-till puzzle that Cubbage says a grower needs to evaluate:

1. You need to choose your application system.

2. Pick your GPS auto-steer program.

3. Make decisions surrounding variable-rate technology.

4. Determine how you will use the data you can collect.

Choosing Equipment

Cubbage says one of the first decisions you’ll need to make is what type of strip-till machine you’re going to utilize. Will it be a pull-type rig or operate off a 3-point hitch? And you’ll need to determine the horsepower requirements of your tractor.

In his fall stripping operation, Cubbage has chosen a 16-row 5310 DMI toolbar with a Flexi-Coil air cart. They also pull an anhydrous…