Back in 1970, 100 bushels of corn per acre was a dandy yielding crop. That’s the year I started farming full-time. It was a decent corn crop for 10 to 15 years. Corn trash or residue wasn’t a big concern. It was chopped up and plowed down.
Eastern Ontario corn growers were getting 150 to 200 bushels per acre in recent years and a few even topped at 240 bushels. Now the quest is for 300 bushels. Seed companies and crop scientists say it’s possible. They say growing 200 bushels can be accomplished with good management. For 300 bushels farmers will need cleaner fields, better plant nutrition and higher plant populations. Seed companies have developed corn with new triple stack hybrids that are producing healthier roots and thereby higher grain corn yields.
The huge problem with the high yielding corn crop is the trash. One hundred bushels an acre produces about three tonnes of trash per acre. Two hundred bushels leaves about six tonnes of trash per acre. If the mat of residue stays on the surface it makes it difficult to no-till a crop into the ground the following spring. The stuff will have to be chopped up, disked down, removed or plowed down. And there goes the no-till philosophy.
A few years ago at a farm show I saw a very long 10-furrow plow on display with a sign on it that it had been sold. It was a plow built for turning over corn stalks and trash. List price was $90,000. Curious to know who had bought the monster plow, I sought out the salesman whom I knew well. He told me that a cash-cropper with 2,000 acres of corn wanted this plow. He commented that we’ve come full circle. Some dealers are not able to sell no-till drills. There’s no interest in them, he said. But the dealers are increasingly selling big plows. “We’re back to plowing,” he said.
I read somewhere that if you want to look at the future of farming, you have to look at the past. What goes around, comes around. There is some truth to that statement. I never thought I’d see farmers in my neighbourhood plow with horses and do all their farm work with horses. That is a sight to see around Douglas. Plowing is certainly making a comeback, even in dry countries like Australia. Look at all the new large models of plows that machine companies are making. Check it out on the Internet.
