May 5, 2015 | Pat Beaujot

My Interview on Rural Radio Live

Recently I had the opportunity to be interviewed by Mark Oppald on a Sirius XM radio channel called Rural Radio Live that caters to farm audiences. As this is still a great way to interact with growers, I wanted to participate and share my experience. Mark and I had a great conversation about small grains seeding.

We had our sales and service staff provide a list of questions that they often get at the trade show booths or from dealer sales staff. I had the opportunity to review the questions prior to the interview so I knew what I was getting into. Many of the questions were ones I have been answering for 20 years so it wasn’t too hard for me to do this live. In fact many of them I have addressed in my various blogs. I focused on questions that would come from new customers who weren’t familiar with our machines.

We also had Nathan Sapach one of our experience technicians to handle questions about the new iCon Wireless Control System on the 2016 machines hitting the field right now. I am not familiar enough with the operating system to handle those questions so Nathan handled that and did a great job.

This is a US based radio station but as with Sirius XM radio it can be heard wherever there is a subscriber. We focused our questions on the Northern Great Plains small grains seeding areas which would include the Dakotas and Montana. I have found it interesting watching the no-till adoption across the Canadian Prairies and the Northern US. There was a great start in North Dakota in the 80s and 90s but the wet weather has caused many of the growers there to go back to tillage. This has also happened somewhat in Southern Manitoba but I don’t believe to the extent it has in North Dakota.

I believe the reason most Canadian farmers have stuck with no-till even through the wet years is they are using knife openers to seed and not discs. Knives work ok in muddy conditions whereas discs often stop turning and just don’t clean. Discs also require so much more weight to penetrate which is not what you want when you’re going around potholes. I also can’t emphasise enough how our two knife system aerates the soil where the seed is planted and fertilizer is placed. This bit of tillage is enough to warm up the soil so we don’t have to till the whole field.

When the spring thaw comes the soil temperature varies across the field. Depending on if it is on a north slope or south slope or near a pothole or on a hill top, the temperatures can vary greatly. The aeration we get with our fertilizer knife not only blackens and warms the soil, it also evens out that soil temperature variation across the field. Using a disc opener, which is most common in North Dakota, would result in uneven germination for no-till farmers and that just won’t do, so tillage has become the answer.

I hope my discussion with Mark has peaked the interest of some North Dakota farmers to give knife openers a try. They can still till in wet years or after corn but have the tool to no-till when it is dry enough to do so. The hour went by very quickly to me. When you answer soil, fertilizer, seeding agronomy questions there is never a short answer.

I tried to be as brief and to the point as possible but there are always pros and cons to every decision we make and without properly exploring all of them it is hard to make the right decision. I also feel it is my job to look at the history of what has worked in the past and what hasn’t so we don’t make the same mistake someone made 20 years ago. If you’d like to ask me a question, or comment on  my blog, please tweet me @PatrickBeaujot or @NOTILLville