Longtime western Oklahoma no-tiller Jimmy Smith and his son Spencer keep their sandy soils in place by interseeding cereal rye into standing cotton. They’re using a Dalton Ag Mobility 600 fertilizer applicator to get the job done.

How will those tough market prices affect your nutrient management plans for 2025? Univ. of Illinois soil scientist Andrew Margenot says you might want to think about dialing back P and K rates if possible.

Our harvest season odyssey continues in Amboy, Ill., where I spent the day with Dave Thompson, a farmer turned precision specialist for Case IH dealer Johnson Tractor.

On this edition of Conservation Ag Update, brought to you by CultivAce, we head to Amboy, Ill., where Dave Thompson shares his top takeaways from harvest season. Univ. of Illinois soil scientist Andrew Margenot discusses why some no-tillers might want to dial back P and K rates next growing season.

For this 2025 National No-Tillage Conference preview, Rockwell City, Iowa, no-tiller James Hepp checks in with a look at his highly modified Case IH 1200 pivot-fold no-till planter.

This one comes to us from Carl Clark on TikTok. The central Illinoisan planted soybeans into 5-foot-tall ryegrass, before terminating it with Roundup. No residuals. No post-emergence applications. He says the beans have been hard to cut and there’s some waterhemp scattered about. He thought he messed up, but let’s see what the yield monitor says.

As an agronomist turned custom strip-tiller, Donnellson, Iowa, farmer Mark Dobson is on the road quite a bit and visits a lot of farms in different regions. The biggest takeaway from his 2024 travels as harvest season reaches a crescendo?

Let’s go from Vincennes, Ind., to Williamsport, Ind., where fellow No-Till Innovator Rick Clark has reached what some consider the holy grail — his 7,000 acres are 100% no-till, 100% organic and 100% free of synthetic nutrients, herbicides, pesticides and fungicides. Clark gives us a look at what his soil looks like on a late fall day.

Corn harvest is about 50% done and soybeans are at 67% according to the October 13 USDA Crop Progress Report. Let’s talk about the phantom yield loss phenomenon, which is the loss of potential corn yields when some parts of a field are harvested later than others. Our Conservation Ag Operator Fellow Ray McCormick found a way to avoid phantom yield loss on his farm in southern Indiana.

On this edition of Conservation Ag Update, brought to you by CultivAce, Vincennes, Ind., No-Till Innovator Ray McCormick explains how he cracked the phantom yield code on his farm.