Ron,

You bring up a couple good points.

First of all the 3-coulter Rawson-type system is very different from ours in several ways. #1 is that all residue within the approx 10" width of the standard Rawson system is cut and largely hairpinned into the seed zone with the aggressive wide wavy coulters.

Our Trashwheels on our Pluribus move essentially all of the above ground residue to the side and most is not worked into the seed zone. We lift, aerate and mix the soil and fertilizer. The systems are very different.

By clearing the residue to the side we actually concentrate it between the rows.

When we move over the next year, most of it has been at least partially broken down. What hasn't broken down we scoot to the side again or lift up it up and out of there.

While we don't recommend it, we can make a decent strip right over the top of the row if necessary as when someone using markers straightens out rows the first year with rtk.

I demonstrated this to some customers just last week at the Ohio Farm Science Review field demos. The problem is tha tif you try this in the fall right behind the combines as I was, many of the root balls come out with the stalk, possibly leaving a void.

Going over any two year old rootballs or stalks which have not broken down we will get them out of the way with no problem. Our lifting and turbulent mixing is very different from running a Rawson or a Super Coulter type device over stalks. The aeration really gets the soil microbes working between the rows.

The other thing that our Pluribus system does is to avoid the aleopathic (sp) problems in a corn on corn system where residue is not removed from the seed zone.

Even so there are some far north areas (Dakotas, Manitoba) with long cool but drier winters where stalks do not break down even with the above. Here folks will often run a Canadian roller over the field after stripping and planting. These rollers kink the stalks like they went through a wringer washer as well as pushing down rocks and making harvest much easier even with "flex" direct cut beans.

Strip tilling between standing corn stalks in the spring, planting 30" edible or soy beans and then rolling with a large diameter roller is a growing means of raising various bean crops in a variety of locations.

In your IL climate you will have residue between the rows like the IL photo above which is from near Bloomington. There is a LOT of residue in these high yielding crops. It will take a while to get up to equilibrium even with our system but your climate is conducive to good breakdown of residue under the canopy in the summer. The Iowa photo is from an Eastern IA  field that has been in continuous corn for many years.

Jim at Dawn