Agronomist Notes

It’s now Monday night, a day after our two week CTF tour and I’ve finally got time to finish the newsletter. Jet lag hit me like a Mac truck and I’m slowly getting used to wearing long pants and breathing in air that 45 degrees colder than it was a day ago. I know, boo hoo for me.  

On the tour we visited 17 controlled traffic farms throughout Queensland and Victoria and saw some fantastic inventions and equipment modifications. It’s amazing to see how creative farmers can be when faced with adversity from droughts and low cash flow. I’m coming home inspired and can’t wait to press forward in year two of controlled traffic.

This week we’ll look at a 40 ft CTF system built by Peter Bach near Dalby, QLD and then I’ll review the top five lessons we’ve learned from our CTF farm visits. Interestingly enough, reduced soil compaction was rarely discussed! Next, I’ll show you some great photos taken after 4 inches of rain illustrating the benefits of reduced compaction. In the final article, I’ll show you the benefits of CTF and how it drastically improves on-farm research. We’ll finish with fundamental and technical grain market news.    

This is our last issue of Beyond Agronomy News for 2010. We’ll return Tuesday, January 4th to recap the season and the top articles of 2010. Our family wishes you and yours a Merry Christmas and wonderful New Year. All the best and we’ll see you in 2011! 

Agronomy

Farmer Peter Bach explains his 40 ft CTF system

We stopped into see a young and keen CTF farmer named Peter Bach. Peter farms 3,000 acres of corn, sorghum, wheat, sunflowers and mung beans near a town called Dalby in QLD and he’s doubled sorghum yields since he started using CTF. Peter developed a 40 ft CTF system which is much wider than the typical 30 ft systems we’d seen so far. It was great to see because I think farmers in Western Canada would adopt wider system like 40, 50 or 60 ft given our narrow seeding window.

Peter runs a NH 8870, 220 hp FWA tractor that comfortably pulls the 40 ft drill. As you can see in this picture, he moved the wheels out to 3 m spacing by building his own cotton reels and purchased 100 mm extensions for the back axels. Peter mentioned that additional stress is placed on the wheel bearings and he likes to change them every 1,000 hours.

Another cool invention was Peter’s custom shroud sprayer. The 40 ft sprayer allows him to spray non-selective herbicides like RoundUp in between his row crops. CTF and RTK guidance allows him the opportunity to use herbicides that most conventional systems do not. What a fantastic option for less competitive crops. In our own CTF system, I can see us using RoundUp in between pea or lentil rows to control kochia, Canada thistle or annual sow thistle if we add pulses in the rotation.

I really appreciated Peter’s candidness about the risks of extending axels with cotton reels. Changing wheel bearings every 1,000 hours may not be everyone’s cup of tea but really, changing bearings every four to five years isn’t a massive task and not a large expense. The greatest take home from Peter’s farm was his ability to pull 40 ft with 220 hp. Some Steve’s quick math will tell you that his tractor is worth about $100,000 less than the 350 hp tractors we pull 40 ft with and his fuel bill is about half of what ours is. Run the numbers on those two cost reductions, ignoring the yield improvements, and CTF has the potential to save us a lot of money. SL

Key points from veteran farmers using controlled traffic

• CTF does not have to happen overnight. You can progress into CTF over time as you begin to match up equipment widths and axel widths. Nobody says you have to flip a switch and go all in year one.
• CTF equipment set ups don’t have to be expensive and I can attest to this. Many of the farms invested less than $15,000 to get into CTF and some took a few years while cash flow allowed.
• You don’t have to be anal about CTF. For example, if you have to jump off a tram line to unload at harvest because you can’t make it to the end of the run, then jump off and unload. The extra wheel traffic created by jumping off the tram lines to unload amounts to a very small percentage across the farm.   
• CTF opens up a world of precision application opportunities: inter-row seeding to inter-row spraying herbicides, on-row spraying of fungicides and insecticides, in-crop fertilizer banding, and strip till banding fertilizer in the fall. 
• CTF creates spatial awareness. With the aid of application and yield mapping you can begin to eliminate the variables that reduce yield in your cropping system. Once you reduce the randomness of input applications, you can start to extract valuable yield data because the placement of inputs is so precise.
• CTF improves the timeliness of input applications. We all know how important timing is in farming. With CTF, growers can get on the field sooner after a rain than conventional farming systems. Improving the timeliness of seeding, spraying and harvest can generate big returns. 
• CTF reduces fuel use by 30 to 50%, with big savings during harvest. For example, drive a loaded combine weighing in excess of 60,000 lbs across a soft field and then drive it across a pair of hard packed tram lines. Needless to say, the reduction in fuel use is significant.
• On farm research becomes easier and the data collected more valuable with CTF. The pass to pass accuracy in a CTF system allows you to apply treatments and collect yield data knowing exactly how many rows you treated and how many rows you harvested. It eliminates the randomness like input overlap and harvest under lap that skews yield data. SL

CTF improves water infiltration and allows you to get on the field faster

We had a full day of muddy field walking with Robert Ruwoldt from Horsham Victoria, an 8 year veteran of controlled traffic farming. That day harvest was delayed due to the four inches of rain they received that week. Two more inches had fallen the night we arrived into Horsham. Such soggy conditions gave us an opportunity to see some of the greatest benefits of CTF, drainage and moisture retention.

The photo to the right is of a headland, where after four inches of rain, the water is ponding on the soil surface. I would classify this soil as a clay loam and the field has been in controlled traffic for 8 years. In the next photo, you can see water lying on the headland but not in the field where the tram lines are set.

The day before we arrived, Rob had harvested 100 tonnes of canola at 5.6 moisture and was the only one in the area to get on his fields and begin harvest after the rain. Rob and his harvest crew will tell you that the only reason they could harvest was because they could drive on the hard packed tram lines. The minute they slipped off the tram line or turned around on the headland they would get bogged down and make a mess.

A little Steve’s quick math tells me that CTF allowed Rob to harvest $50,000 worth of canola while his neighbors sat and watched. In fact, Rob’s neighbor tried to go harvest and they ended up helping pull him out after making a terrible mess of his fields. How significant is that? Timeliness is everything and CTF opens up a world of opportunities to get on the field faster to begin seeding, spraying and harvesting. I’m now even more convinced of the value in controlled traffic farming. SL

CTF makes on-farm trials a breeze

We had a great talk about the ease of doing on-farm trails using CTF with farm manager Josh Walter near Ballarat, Victoria. Josh will tell you that CTF allows you to run on-farm trials with ease and accuracy because the treatments are so precise from pass to pass. There is no overlap in the system and the harvest data is just as good because you’re harvesting the same number of rows each pass. With application maps and yield monitor maps, you can easily extract the yield from each swath or treatment and have confidence in the results.

To give you an example, this NDVI image shows the boundaries in a gypsum trial with treatments of 2.5 T/ha, 5 T/ha and 10 T/ha along with a check strip on a 12M (38 ft) CTF system. They set up the trials using a variable rate prescription, set the boundaries on each treatment and then extracted the yield data from the monitor after harvest.

You can see the power of CTF and its ability to eliminate random errors which typically pop up in on-farm research. Things like under lap and overlap of application equipment or harvesting can really skew the results of an on-farm trial. Using CTF, you know exactly how many rows you’re harvesting each pass and how many rows received the treatments. With this type of accuracy, you can really start to build confidence in the results and understand which practices work well in your soil type, your climate in your farming system. SL