Conservation Tillage Critical to
Farmers Growing More Corn
by: Anne Keller, director of issues management for the American Farm Bureau Federation.


The size and quality of this year’s corn crop is vying with the weather as the most common topic of conversation among many in and beyond the Corn Belt. While unfavorable weather conditions have occurred, projections for a record corn harvest of around 12.6 billion bushels have not been seriously knocked off track.
 
Some wonder what all this corn means for future soil quality, particularly if farmers want to continue benefiting next year and the year after that from financial opportunities offered by the ethanol-fueled corn market. After all, conventional wisdom holds that corn should not be planted on the same ground repeatedly, but rather should be used in rotation with other crops. 
 
Crop rotation is best, but if farmers are considering a corn-corn rotation, then they may want to use a form of conservation tillage, according to the Conservation Technology Information Center (www.conservationinformation.org), an independent organization affiliated with Purdue University’s agronomy department. In fact, newer methods of “conservation tillage” planting that keep the soil and its moisture and nutrients largely in place, rather than turning over each spring, may make corn-corn rotations conceivable.
 
No-till planting is the most common type of conservation tillage practice, which the CTIC defines as any cropland system that leaves at least a third of the soil covered with the previous year’s crop residue after a subsequent planting.
 
“Conventional tillage is no longer conventional in many parts of the country, it’s a thing of the past,” Kyle Nickel, CTIC’s communications director, said. In fact, a county-by-county crop residue management survey by the CTIC shows only about 33 percent of all cropland acres in the U.S. are still planted using traditional methods such as disking and moldboard plowing.
 
For many years the annual survey was conducted with assistance by Natural Resources Conservation Service employees to help the NRCS efficiently target its programs and materials and provide information about which tillage practices were actually used by farmers. The picture revealed by the data also helped Extension educators develop programs, while businesses used the data to provide farmers with better products, and researchers relied on it to direct their studies.
 
While data collection has become more difficult and limited since 2004, that hasn’t stopped the CTIC’s efforts, as it continued to gather useful cropping data from every county in Illinois, with additional contributions by Iowa, Indiana and Nebraska in 2006. The Illinois data shows that nearly 70 percent of the soybeans planted there last year were sown using conservation tillage. Conventionally planted beans amounted to only 13 percent of the crop -- a figure that would have been considered far-fetched just a few years ago. Corn was behind, with 29 percent of that crop sown with conservation tillage techniques, compared to 49 percent of the crop planted the traditional way.
 
And at this time, southern farmers expanding their corn acres could stand to benefit from the CTIC’s efforts, Nickel said, because they may not be as familiar with conservation tillage practices as they relate to corn or realize the array of resources available to them as they adopt the techniques for larger corn acreages.
 
With ethanol demand booming and corn acreage likely to remain high, it stands to reason that the CTIC’s mapping efforts are needed now more than ever, and the CTIC is looking at its options for increasing its data collection to previous, national levels. As the CTIC’s Nickel said, “Producers these days have to be able to prove they’re good stewards of the land, and we need hard data to help make that clear.”

8/13/07