Unorthodox Fertilizer Application

After terminating the cereal rye cover crop in the corn fields, we let a little time pass for the vegetation to brown up and tip over. Now it's time to side dress fertilizer in a rather unconventional manner, and then interseed new cover crops. This will be a two part miniseries.

[@kl1958]

Love your channel. I used to work for my Uncle on his dairy and hog farm and he improvised as well. I well remember his Farmall H, M, MTA and Ford 8N. He used to plow under a field of alfalfa every year for green manure and together with putting 8-10 ton livestock manure per acre on his corn ground he purchased very little commercial fertilizer and generated very respectable yields. I am envious of you in a good way! Keep up the great work. My uncle's farm was sandy loam and you could always get on it did not have to worry about wet springs.

[@ronwhites1432]

just found your channel watched several episodes, nice to see the small farmer videos. I subscribed as I enjoy just a few acres farm also. keep posting

[@ravenviewfarm]

Thanks for subscribing Ron! I too follow Just A Few Acres. Pete is great!

[@brucerazor5202]

I’m not a farmer however at 62 and 24 surgeries later I really wish I’d have chosen your career

[@nonyadamnbusiness9887]

I see a lot of people saying you can't no till heavy clay soils. This surprises me, as I saw no-till on the heavy clay/loam of west Tennessee in the mid to late 80s. The first farmer to take it up ran a wheat/soybean - corn rotation planting into the wheat stubble, then disked down the corn stubble before drilling wheat again. By the 90s he had a drill that would run through corn stubble without prep. Then all the plowing went away.

[@bralash1721]

Thanks Bro This is way practical and systematic for us young aspiring farmers as Black South Africans. You've simplified and made practical a lot when talking about Corn which we call Maize. 🙏🙏💪💪💪

[@GeigerFarm]

Necessity is the mother of invention 👍🏻

[@cowbells52]

You don’t need to move fertilizer openers if you side dress the opposite way you planted

[@TS-vr9of]

looking forward to see how the crop turns out. be sure to keep us updated.

[@ravenviewfarm]

Will do! I have quite a bit of footage from the summer, but had trouble finding time to do the editing. Getting caught up now in preparation for harvest.

[@Budd56]

@@ravenviewfarm yes please keep us updated when you get the time.... Hope you have a good safe harvest 👍✌️

[@johndycus7800]

Man that’s an ingenious idea!

[@Budd56]

It seems the big farmers are all about making big bushels, and there's nothing wrong with that. Very interesting on what you are doing. 👍👍👍

[@ravenviewfarm]

Hey Budd! You're right about that. Lots of folks get focused on bushels per acre. For me, the best measure of success is dollars per acre. If I can reduce my fertilizer and chemical costs while still making a decent yield, AND improve the performance and resiliency of my soil in the process, then I'm coming out ahead of the guys that are focused strictly on yield alone. And with the reduction in tillage, I have greatly reduced fuel usage and replacement wear parts for the cultivator, disk, plow, chisel plow, etc. That has allowed me some extra money to invest in really tuning up our planting equipment to perform as well as it possibly can. It's all just one big balancing act!

[@trentonromig9765]

Wow this is really awesome very cool

[@internationalfarmer2153]

Very nice video well u got the right planter

[@CentralMississippiWhitetail]

Great channel

[@connordanielson3048]

You should try and find and old planter like the one you own already and use it for just side dressing. You could try and find one on an auction for a decent price

[@ravenviewfarm]

An excellent idea. Since this was our first time doing a split application of fertilizer, it just made sense to work with what we have. If a good deal comes along on a second planter I would consider picking it up, but it would have to be extremely cheap, because it's really not difficult at all to remove and reinstall the row units.

[@nonyadamnbusiness9887]

@@ravenviewfarm I bet there are four row units buried in the weeds all over the country that have had one or more row units pulled. I bet you could haul one home and recoup the cost by selling off the individual row units as replacements.

[@sheilamclaughlin963]

What would happen if u were to drag short chains in the furrow to help cover the fertilizer????

[@jeepcj3b436]

Great video. I raise about 2 acres of corn a year for a herd of cattle in Kentucky and need to replace the ancient Cole Corn Planter I've been using - looking at a 4 row like you have there or possibly a two row 3pt style made from larger JD 7000 and trying to decide whether to stick with dry fertilizer system when planting. In Kentucky the rule of thumb I've always used was 500-700 lbs of 10-10-10 at planting and then top dress with Urea (formerly amonia nitrate) at rate of about 200 lbs/acre. I'm curious what fertilizer you use and how much at which times?

[@redrivervalleyfarmer2045]

Awesome video! I agree with other farmers making excuses not to try regenerative practices. I farm heavy ground in the red river valley and am making it work. One question I have is why don't you pull the interseeder behind the sidedresser and do both jobs at the same time?

[@ravenviewfarm]

We have relatively small fields. That would make for a pretty long rig on the turnarounds. Also, the drill is just a little bit wide, and almost runs over the neighboring rows. It would be tough to compensate on hillsides. Honestly though it might be worth a shot to save fuel and time. I'll have to give that some thought.

[@jefflaue4714]

Good video

[@ThomasM28]

I like the way you're thinking ! If i understood well you've got another job (with customers) next to your farm, what's your job ? Which type of fertilizer do you side dress, and how much please ?

[@ravenviewfarm]

Thomas M You’re correct! I’m a licensed general contractor, doing handyman work and small remodeling projects. I’d like to farm full time, and that is the ultimate goal, but for now this works out pretty well. When there’s farm work to do I just make a hole in my schedule to accommodate it. I don’t have the fertilizer numbers in front of me, and that brain space has been reallocated after a few months, but I’ll dredge up the paperwork and follow up on the question!

[@ThomasM28]

@@ravenviewfarm Ok thank you ! It's not important if you roll with your tyres on the corn of the headland ?

[@AirplaneDoctor_]

I set aside 20 acres per year for three years and tried the inter row cover crop method, and it failed each and every year, weeds overtook every time. Even using pre-emerge spraying didn’t help as the weeds germinated before the cover crop and smothered them out in short order, so this method is not viable in every growing zone.

[@ravenviewfarm]

Hey Airplane Doctor. I'll be the first to say I appreciate your perspective. The difference between you and other guys I've talked to, is that you actually went out and tried it. So many farmers dismiss regenerative practices before they ever make any kind of attempt. You actually did a trial before you reached your conclusion, so I have to respect that. That said, as a mentor for the Minnesota Soil Health Coalition, if we were having a conversation about why your interseeding failed, I would have a whole bunch of questions for you. I would ask about your row spacing, herbicide program, tillage program, what species of cover crops you tried to interseed and at what lb/ac rates, what growth stage the corn was at when you interseeded, what equipment you used to do the interseeding, where you're located, what the weather conditions were, and so on and so forth in an effort to understand the WHOLE picture of what you were doing for those growing years. Then we would put our heads together and try to determine the reason(s) for failure, and see if there were tweaks we could make that would lead to improved results. Now, that's just an example and I'm not advising you in an official capacity, so no need to lay all of that out in the comments section of KZbin here. ;0) All I can say is that we've had great success with interseeding over the last three years, and have seen our weed pressure decline each year and our soil quality and structure improve. We're still making tweaks to the system all the time, so it's never perfect, but we're not really shooting for perfection so much as improvement. Cheers!

[@craighinshaw2437]

Why not use a old shop vac instead buckets

[@badrumulyazzawo3119]

I like it

[@TheJohndeere466]

I was thinking of doing this with an IH cyclo 400. They were not the best planter so you can buy them for 200.00. I thought about making the planter 3 point hitch so the planter tires would not be running down so much corn on the ends. Actually some of the cyclo 400 planters were 3 point hitch but most had tires on them How did your corn yield after applying your urea this way?

[@ravenviewfarm]

Hey James. Sorry this reply is months overdue. To sum it all up, between our initial application at planting time, and this side-dress application, we applied about 135 units of N to this corn crop. From that, we averaged about 175 bushels/acre. In our big 18 acre field, where the ground is particularly rich, I know we ran over 200 in some spots. It was counterbalanced by the 8 acre field where the soil isn't so hot. That probably ran closer to 140. Overall I was VERY pleased with the results. It may not have been a record breaking crop, but it was considerably more profitable than a lot of our past years. For reference, that 135 units of N was about 25% less fertilizer than we would have historically applied.

[@bslturtle]

Must be difficult to look at that mud puddle

[@nonyadamnbusiness9887]

Farmer excuses for not cover cropping are ridiculous. To put in a cover crop you need a sack and at least one hand. The seed comes in a sack. Crimson clover fixes enough nitrogen to pay for the seed in fertilizer savings.

[@ravenviewfarm]

Couldn't agree more! For a lot of guys its just fear of the unknown. I'd never go back to heavy tillage and strict monocultures.

[@justinmartin1267]

What cover crop are you using

[@plowmaster1206]

Clover adds 250lbs of nitrogen to corn?

[@romullogomes141]

Sou brasileiro

[@calebperkins4268]

hey i got john deer 2040

[@mr.stumppuller7193]

Dude your paying a huge carbon penalty I would just bet your 150 bu tops

[@ravenviewfarm]

Good guess, but we did a little better than that. Should yield be the primary goal?