Kansas farmer Richard Unruh uses the 30-foot SMART-TILL® on corn fields he wants to strip till. One of the main advantages he sees is that SMART-TILL® does not size residue into small pieces; it keeps it on the surface, and the strip till works a lot better after running the SMART-TILL®.
"I've run the SMART-TILL® on about 2,500 acres, and it's all corn ground," Richard says. "And my agronomist is very, very happy with the job it's done. Actually, he's become a real fan of the SMART-TILL® machine after seeing what it's done on my farm."
According to his agronomist, Richard's farm has better emergence than other farms, while Richard adds that he sees more even emergence in the spring because the residue is not covering up the strip till.
"Primarily we're using the SMART-TILL® with the rows; we don't want to cross the rows because we want to leave a little bit of stalk standing where the trash will stay where it is," Richard says. "It will catch on the standing stalks; it leaves probably about 45% of the stalks standing, and these are pivot-irrigated circles."
"Before I owned a SMART-TILL®, we would just go in in the fall and pull a strip-till bar, and we [were] having too much residue," he says. "It would want to blow around and cover our row, and it just wasn't clean enough when we'd go to plant, and it just made a big difference with running one trip with the SMART-TILL® in the fall."