Jacob,

I have to respectfully disagree with the Oklahoma shank-type strip till test results. Maybe they are OK for OK (sorry) but definitely not in northern IL or IA or MN or ....

There was a strip till seminar locally a year or so ago when I was on a program with an agronomist from the Elburn Coop, a large coop that has done custom strip till in the fall with a shank type machine. This agronomist was very, very specific about the differences in yield in our heavy, often drummer, northern IL soils between when the planter was absolutely on the fall knife slot to where it was even a couple inches off.

This was so obvious that they proceeded to add toolbar mounted coulters a couple inches either side of the mole knife based row unit following. This was an attempt to try to widen the strip and lessen the effects of wandering a couple inches with the planter.

To say you can be 4.5" off of a fall knife-based slot with the planter in the spring in IL and not see a yield difference is TOTALLY not the case. There were many possible reasons discussed by the agronomist from Elburn coop which I won't get into here.

In this discussion/thread "strip till" is being discussed as if it was some singular practice. It is not.

Strip till is like ice cream - its all ice cream but it comes in many different flavors.

Jim at Dawn