The last newsletter covered how compaction forms in your fields. The yield loss and increased cost for a unit of production are real. Bigger tractors, even with more tires, and an attitude of we have to get this done, have increased the size of wet areas in the fields and turned even well drained soils into something much less. The popularity of the vertical tillage that farmers have been told they can go on the field anytime and it will dry it, results in tremendous compaction issues. One farm I worked with actually ripped the legs off of a deep tillage unit when they tried to remove the vertical tillage compaction. My research crop had only rooted 2 inches deep on that farm.
