Excellent 2nd day today (Wed) at FPS. We had a good number of NAT folks stop by this morning. Very nice to put a face with a name.

The strip till demos are running all 3 days starting at 10 am. The format is a bit different than the combine or tillage demos. Each company participating had 72 rows wide by 600 ft long to work in for all three days.

We really were surprised at how many folks visited our booth and then wanted to see the machine in action. We about ran the wheels off of a rented 4-seat golf cart ferrying folks back and forth to the field for the past 2 days!

We chose standing stalks rather than shredded. As I said earlier, our Dawn Pluribus is basically a SPRING tool in cornstalks like these but we wanted to be out there to show that we can run through the stalks at high speeds without plugging. We are making a surprisingly good strip given the extremely hard and dry soil conditions - getting drier every day. We are generally making a strip in the 5", occasionally 6" deep by 8-10" wide range. The berm appeared to be about 2-3 in high in most places.

I appreciate the excellent job done by Farm Progress publications on this show. It is not an easy task. I think this site will work out well for the future. Thanks to all the NAT folks that stopped by. Should be a bit cooler tomorrow.

Here are some Strip Till field demo photos of our machine. Again, this fall strip till into corn stalks is NOT an application that we would recommend. What our customers generally choose to do is strip into wheat stubble in the late summer or fall (=now), strip into corn stalks in the SPRING, strip into bean stubble either fall or spring but lean to spring because of possible erosion concerns on slopes.

No matter which strip till manufacturer or type machine you choose, you have to be careful on slopes. Water follows the path of least resistance down hill - and that is usually the strip, no matter which type of machine makes it. Stripping in the spring avoids that concern.

Strips into cornstalks are much prettier places to plant when made in the spring as well as less likely to lose expensive N fertilizer. Strips made into wheat stubble in the fall are warmer and drier in the spring. The good thing about wheat is it holds moisture. The bad thing about wheat is that it holds moisture - strip till wheat stubble, usually for corn, in the fall.

In these photos we requested the stubble be left standing. I would recommend the head be run a bit higher yet if I were doing it myself. There were no spreaders nor choppers used at the FPS - all straw and chaff just dropped straight down. Some rows therefore had enormous amounts of residue while others were more normal. In practice with a spreader or chopper on the combine and stalks left a bit taller the strips would have been much prettier. By the way I am not good with photoshop or the strips would be darker (wink).

Jim at Dawn

(Dawn Strip Till FPS 07 demo 082807 corn stalks hot hard dry_IMG_0252.JPG)

(Dawn Strip Till FPS 07 demo 082807 corn stalks hot hard dry_5_inch deep_IMG_0254.JPG)

(Dawn Strip Till FPS 07 demo 082807 corn stalks hot hard dry_2.5_inch high_IMG_0255.JPG)

Dawn Strip Till FPS 07 demo 082807 corn stalks hot hard dry_IMG_0252.JPG (80KB - 81 downloads)

Dawn Strip Till FPS 07 demo 082807 corn stalks hot hard dry_5_inch deep_IMG_0254.JPG (96KB - 76 downloads)

Dawn Strip Till FPS 07 demo 082807 corn stalks hot hard dry_2.5_inch high_IMG_0255.JPG (90KB - 77 downloads)