Several years ago, I was holding a meeting for local school cafeteria managers and staff on the importance of serving high-quality, cold milk with school meals. The subject of how clean is clean enough came up, and I offered a suggestion from my days running the farm dairy.
“My goal was for the barns to be so clean that if you were to drop an ice cream cone on the floor, you’d feel comfortable picking it up to eat it.” A local farmer shared her barns could never be that clean.
“Neither were mine,” I shared. “I never achieved that goal; that was where I set the bar.”
The point was that if you develop an “Aww, that’s good enough” attitude on some things, that becomes the standard for everything. It is also true that “good enough” is a rolling scale. What is good enough for you may be a different level when good enough is applied by an employee.
Perfection. Perfection on the farm is rarely achieved; however, I often wonder how many dollars are lost per acre and per farm on “that’ll do” execution.
No one has done more practical work on perfect planting than David Hula. I had the privilege of visiting his farm on a tour of Virginia’s Eastern Shore farms and I can attest to the fact that David's approach to record-setting corn can be seen by how organized his shop is and how well maintained the farmstead is kept.
Hula’s approach to perfection is not so much as to do everything correctly as it is to eliminate as many mistakes as possible and let the Good Lord look after the rest.
As we are entering into the planning stages for this year’s growing season, it is never too early to start getting things ready for our latest attempt at perfection.
Our first steps for the perfect stand should have already happened. Soil testing to check the ground’s ability to support our coming year’s crop can never be overlooked. It’s been more than 40 years since a seasoned college professor of mine shared, “Fertile soils will occasionally produce a crop failure, but infertile soils will never produce a bounty.”
Of all the soil test evaluations, make sure your pH is where you need it to be for the crop you have chosen. A point or two, high or low, in pH will bind other plant nutrients up to the point where your investment in fertilizers is neutralized.
Along with checking your soils’ fertility, selecting the crop you are going to grow is just as important. Our local tractor club loves to have wheat on hand for demonstrations with our reaping, binding, threshing and baling operations.
Winter wheat was accidentally planted in the spring, thinking that since it was warmer, the wheat would just do that much better. The result was a crop that got about 4 to 6 inches high and turned yellow.
That cold-weather dormancy is when winter wheat puts down its roots and gets ready for a great surge in the spring. Without that cold weather, the winter wheat won’t function.
Once we have the soil ready and the crop selected, the planter needs to be ready to place that seed perfectly.
First, is the planter or drill balanced and calibrated properly? If you’ve ever seen a planter pulled down the road looking like a dragster, with its rear end noticeably higher than the front, you need to balance or level your planter.
Using the adjustments on the tongue or toolbar, your planter should go up to transport and down to begin seed placement as level as possible. This keeps your seed placement at the optimal depth and your planter at its most efficient.
You also need to check your planter or drill for signs of wear. Openers, seed drops and closers and row cleaners can all, wear of course. They also do not need to be worn out to affect your approach towards perfection.
Coulters should run together to form a nicely shaped “V” trench in the soil that allows the seed to be dropped at exactly the correct depth. As the coulters wear, they separate from each other to the point where the “V” trench is shaped more like a “W” where a small band of soil is left undisturbed by the planter.
The seed when dropped in a “W” trench is generally planted too shallow. Add in closers that are worn just as much as the openers, and you have an expensive bird feeder.
While we on are the subject of seed placement perfection, let me share some personal experience on soil preparation.
This again goes back to my undergrad days when a college professor shared that “the rougher you can leave the soil surface, the better off you’ll be.” His point was to avoid as much tillage as possible and use no-till as much as you could.
Our heavy clay soils were easily compacted. Even trying to avoid using the same ground as entry points or pathways, by the time manure spreaders, fertilizer tenders, planters, forage harvesters and silage trucks finished with the clay banks, they had to be ripped or chisel plowed.
Even with vertical tillage and freezes and thaws, the chunks left on the surface made spring field work a challenge. First, navigating the ground was like crossing railroad tracks without the benefit of approaches and pavement. Second, many clods were too large for pre-emergent weed treatments to adequately do their job.
Smoothing those areas with a culti-mulcher was a great help. Not only did it help in weed control, but because it smoothed the surface we were planting, the seeds germinated more uniformly and our stands were more uniform and productive.
A drill or planter that hits a soil “speed bump” tends to rise up as it strikes the obstacle, leaving seed too shallow to have proper seed-to-soil contact. Conversely, as it plunges back down after the shock, it buries the seed too deep until forward motion brings it back to normal depths.
Finally, you need to calibrate your drill or planter before you put it in the field. My colleagues and I used to help check seed meters on older planters. You might be surprised how many meters came from the factory with the belts in backward.
As far as drills go, there are some great how-to videos online. I encourage you to search for my friend, Chris Tuetch, at the University of Kentucky. Chris and I were in the same “new hire” class with Virginia Cooperative Extension nearly 26 years ago. There’s no one I trust more as far as forages go. That brings us to an important point. People you can trust are the most important assets you have. Experience is not always the best teacher, although it is likely the most expensive lessons you will learn.
Look for someone who will share their failures as well as their successes. Success is difficult to duplicate, but mistakes breed like crazy.
