Monte Bottens Highlights Tile Water Monitoring Project

Wrapping up as always with our Video of the Week. The No-Till Conference presented Monte Bottens with the Most Outstanding Speaker Award for his 2024 presentation, “Making Grazing So Easy a Corn Grower Can Do It.” During his acceptance talk, Bottens highlighted some of the on-farm trials he’s got going on this year in Cambridge, Ill.

“Every acre on our farm has a replicated test plot for nutrients, cropping practices. We just started a long-term tillage, tillage-cover crop, no-till, no-till-cover crop (trial) in partnership with Illinois Soybean to get real intensive data on that. We also have a tile water monitoring project we’re working on. We have a theory. Dad invested a lot in pattern tiling many years ago before it was cool. We’re concerned about what nutrients we’re sending off, but we think if you manage nutrients right judiciously, we’re not having a problem. We’re going to compare a pattern tile system to an old clay tile system under our nitrogen management vs. tapping into the neighbor’s tile that would be on a fall-applied higher nitrogen management plan, just to have those data sets, so that we can be prepared when the regulators want to drop the hammer on us, we can say, ‘Hey it’s not the tile, it’s the nutrient management on top of the tile.’”   

Interesting, looking forward to seeing how those trials shake out. 

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