Two US equipment makers have combined their products into a strip-till system they say lets row-crop growers adopt the practice without the deep tillage, high horsepower, slow speeds and cost that usually come with it. The Falcon SF700 integrates Iowa-based Kinze Manufacturing's 5700 toolbar — with its hydraulic weight-transfer system and flotation — and Illinois-based Yetter Manufacturing's 2984 strip freshener CC (cab control) row unit.

Strip-till is widely credited as a conservation practice that uses soil, seed and inputs more efficiently, but adoption stalls on up-front cost and the belief that everything has to change at once. "The management, the ideology, just everything really has kind of been bred into us to think that if you're going to strip-till, you have to change every single thing that you do equipment-wise and mindset wise, and that's just a roadblock for a lot of farmers," said Andy Thompson, Yetter's strip-till product director. It need not be so, he says: "We don't have to go so many inches deep. We don't have to go so many inches wide. We don't have to do it at a specific time."

The SF700 is a high-speed tool working at depths of 1.5 to 4 inches and speeds of 9.7 to 16 km/h. "You can start as just a tillage operation. You don't need to have high horsepower. You don't need to apply fertilizer," said Brad Niensteadt, Kinze's lead product specialist — growers can use the tractor they already have rather than the big unit a deep strip-till pass demands. Yetter says its 2984 units are being pulled with common 350-hp front-wheel-assist tractors, on about two-tenths of a gallon of fuel an acre, covering 55 to 60 acres an hour with a 60-foot machine.

The Kinze toolbar comes in 20-, 22- and 30-inch row configurations and widths from 40 to 66 feet; 30-inch rows are the strip-till standard, but the 5700 also serves a growing regional market for narrower rows — soybean growers on 15-inch rows, Niensteadt says, may move to 20 or 22 inches "to get a little more air and a little less disease pressure, especially if it's a damp spring". The toolbar has 30 degrees of wing flex, 15 up and 15 down, with weight pushed evenly to the wings by the hydraulic system.

Used as a fertiliser machine, the unit takes two optional 750-gallon tanks; it handles only liquid fertiliser for now, though the companies are looking at dry capacity — "in Canada especially, dry fertilizer may be a little more prevalent in certain areas," Niensteadt said. Yetter says the strip configuration aligns easily with planter configuration for accurate seed placement, and Niensteadt expects the SF700 to do best in Canada's corn and soybean regions.

Source: Manitoba Co-operator