Chuck Zumbrun is a 20-year no-tiller, farming 1,200 acres of corn, soybeans, winter wheat and cereal rye and other cover crops in Indiana, northwest of Fort Wayne. Their family has been farming here in Indiana for 100 years.
They gave no-till a go in 1978, but it didn’t work out for them due to the lack of modern conveniences that we have today in the areas of equipment, herbicides, and hybrids. But in the early 1990s, there was more tools “to help a no-till effort be successful, so we gave it another shot.” Their main incentive was to save on labor and machinery costs. “As the years passed, however, we noticed many other benefits. Our soils weren’t blowing or washing away and they were actually improving.” They live in an area “that is increasingly suburban”. Their water supply has been affected by algae in Lake Erie, but by practicing no-till, they keep their soil and nutrients in place instead of having them go down the creek.
As they were focusing on conservation and soil health parts of no-till, they made changes to their operation. They “installed buffer strips seeded to native grasses along our waterways and field edges bordering wooded acres”. They have filter strips along their waterways to help keep soil and nutrients out of the river.
A major change for them has been cover crops. They had liked the idea of growing their own nitrogen and they “got our feet wet seeding red clover in soybean stubble to produce N for our corn crop the coming year”. The cover crops, they discovered, significantly improved the tilth of their heavy clay soils. Their planters and drills knifed easily into their soils. Since their focus was shifting more to building soil structure and soil health with the cover crops, they switched to cereal rye as their go-to species, and they seed that into corn stalks that will be rotated to soybeans.
Zumbrun has used a variety of methods to seed the cereal rye, from hiring a custom operator with a self propelled sprayer, using aerial applications and drilling or broadcasting the seed onto stubble after harvest.
The cereal rye forms a thick mat, which has been a huge benefit for them because it has eliminated a need for a second herbicide application because the thick mat stops weeds. Also, “the cereal rye helps hold moisture later in the season.”
They were slowly working wheat out of their farm until Chuck attended a National No-Tillage Conference and heard of “the benefits of crop diversity and the importance of lengthening our rotations.” They got serious about wheat again and “reversed course”. Subsequently, their crop rotation was lengthened from “basically 2 years to 4, and now goes winter wheat, soybeans, corn, soybeans and winter wheat or cereal rye grown for seed”. They now plant cover crops on 100% of their ground. They help increase our diversity.
“With this added diversity and lengthened rotation, we’ve found we have practically zero issues with pests or disease. Add in the dense mat from our cereal rye cover crops that hold back weeds, and we don’t have much need for expensive traited or glyphosate-tolerant corn or soybeans. We’ve been able to shift to growing almost exclusively conventional corn and soybeans thanks to a longer rotation and cover crops.”
When Chuck Zumbrun was a young guy, they were thrilled to get 40 bushels/acre from a wheat crop; now, they are consistently hitting a 90-bushel average. “To achieve these higher yields we have to take a few more steps than we usually did in the past. Each crop gets two passes with a fungicide and two passes with N (Nitrogen). We apply the same amount of N each year, but we adjust the rate per pass depending on the crop and conditions. Nitrogen is streamed on with our hagie self-propelled sprayer.” Their first application of nitrogen is in early spring “when the snow is coming off and the ground is freezing and thawing.”
Bringing cover crops into their operation also brought more expense. They like to reduce expenses; they are making some efforts to do the same with cover crops. One of their solutions is to grow their own cereal rye seed. They have experimented with a spinner spreader on a sidedress bar to apply covers while sidedressing. They save $20-$30 dollars per acre because of not having to apply a second herbicide pass. They want to cut back on fertilizer, but they may have to wait 10 or 20 years “to see reduced fertilizer costs, but we just have to be patient and wait for those results to come in”.
Chuck knows that they are doing something good. It won’t just benefit them this year, “but every year down the line. That is true of cover crops and of all the other practices we’re implementing, including no-till and lengthened rotations. We’re doing this in the hopes that this farm will continue on for another 100 years and beyond.”
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