By ANN HINCH
Assistant Editor

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — In the limestone soil of southeastern Pennsylvania’s Amish country, much fieldwork is accomplished with horses and non-motorized equipment, including plowing.

When Lapp Bros. LLC – owned by brothers Eugene and Curtis of Kinzers, Pa., and also employing their father, Aaron – decided to transition to a no-till operation for their silage corn, alfalfa, winter wheat and soybeans, they started by attending that year’s annual National No-Tillage Conference, co-sponsored by No-Till Farmer of Wisconsin. Earlier this month, Eugene Lapp was invited to speak at the 17th conference.

While educating themselves about no-till, Lapp said the family’s next step was to be convinced the transition would work. A wise speaker once told him that a farmer’s first layer of compaction “is not what’s under our feet, but what’s five feet above our feet” while tapping his head.

The Lapps had doubts. “We had this myth that we ran into, when you switch to no-till, at least for the first two years, you run into yield drag,” Lapp said – which isn’t necessarily true. Letting doubts cloud one’s plan can do as much to negate the transition as actual problems might, he explained.

Third, he advised having the right equipment. The Lapps had a John Deere bean planter but couldn’t apply nitrogen simultaneous with planting. A local Amish equipment shop reconfigured it into a twin-row planter with nitrogen injection between those rows, putting the fertilizer 4 inches from the seed on each side as it was planted.
Lapp said they used this to plant silage corn in 30-inch rows – the twin function essentially reduced spacing to 22 inches outside each of the 8-inch twin rows, but planted alternately, creating less competition that he said made for corn stalks with better standability and digestability because of more pith.

He said using this method, they increased their production by 2-3.75 tons of silage, or 10 percent. He said the increased production allowed the farm to pay off the $14,000 alteration on the planter in only its first year of use.

But even that wasn’t what helped him most in going to no-till, at least not as much as his RID (reduced inner diameter) depth gauge. “If there’s anything I could point to as making the single biggest change, I’d pick that right there,” he said.

Lapp also uses a posi-close wheel with curved-in “fingers” to break up surface compaction in drier soils on his farm, a subsoiler for the red clay knobs of soil, which was also helpful in pulling out rocks, and a no-till drill.

Fourth, he advised farmers to have a simple herbicide plan, a Roundup Ready program and a certified crop advisor to scout their fields. For a few dollars per acre, he said his advisor checks for diseased plants and weed escape patches on a regular basis and saves him chemicals and trouble.

“Anybody who is a rookie at this no-till business, hire yourself a good consultant,” Lapp added.

Next, he said to check the soil to determine how to best eliminate compaction and avoid recurrence. He also advised a farmer to decide which cover crops to incorporate, to prevent erosion and improve soil organics – Lapp said there are oats, annual ryegrass, tillage radish and cereal rye, to name a few.

Finally, he advised farmers to commit to continuous no-till instead of a rotational tillage program – he said this is how many farmers who say they’ve briefly tried no-till justify not going back to it, because they didn’t give it a chance to work. For farmers who believe they cannot go to 100 percent no-till, Lapp advised transitioning at least some acres to 100 percent no-till.