Big Trends, Ideas Shaping the Future of No

On this episode of Conservation Ag Update, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, the No-Till Farmer editorial team shares their top conservation ag takeaways and observations at the 2026 Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa. Mackane Vogel dives into the 2026 National Cover Crop Report for some of the biggest cover crop trends with perspective from CTIC executive director Ryan Heiniger and cover crop expert Keith Berns. Vogel also stops by the BASF plots for some no-till insights from the company’s top crop protection experts. Noah Newman catches up with Jim Schwartz, Beck’s director of research, agronomy and PFR (Practical Farm Research), for some advice on how to increase your chances of success by choosing hybrids with the right root architecture for your system. Senior editor John Dobberstein reports from the PTx booth with a look at the brand-new ArrowTube seed-orienting delivery system and a conversation with the engineer who built it. In the Agronomy Zone, Madison, Ala., strip-tiller Chad Henderson shares how he sets up on-farm trials to test the latest cutting-edge products. Finally, in the Video of the Week, No-Till Legend Marion Calmer shares his experiences with planting short corn the past 3 years. This episode of Conservation Ag Update is brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment. Since 1930, Yetter Farm Equipment has been providing farmers with profitable solutions. From residue management and fertilizer placement to seedbed preparation, our equipment is designed to maximize your inputs, save you time, and deliver a strong return on investment. Explore our full line of planter attachments, precision fertilizer placement options, strip-till units, and stalk rollers at yetterco.com. Let Yetter help you prepare your equipment lineup for success today. TRANSCRIPT Jump to a section or scroll for the full episode... - Welcome to the 2026 Farm Progress Show - NEW: National Cover Crop Survey Report Reveals Latest Trends - How Yield Contest-Winning Strip-Tiller Tests New Products on His Farm - BASF Experts Share No-Till Crop Protection Insights - PTx ArrowTube Engineer Discusses Seed-Orienting Delivery System - Root Architecture: Matching Hybrids to the Way You Plant - Video of the Week: Marion Calmer’s Short Corn Takeaways Welcome to the 2026 Farm Progress Show I'm Andy Thompson with Yetter Farm Equipment coming to you from Farm Progress Show 2026. We're here showing off the new Rebel Row unit amongst some other new products from Yetter. Welcome to Conservation Ag Update. We're here at the nation's largest outdoor farm show. Managing editor Noah Newman here, and man, it's hot. Heat index over a hundred degrees, but that hasn't stopped us from racking up over 28,000 steps walking around the show, checking out all the cool new things on display. And hey, the book is out. Cover crops are hot here at the Farm Progress Show. For more on that, let's send it over to managing editor Mackane Vogel. NEW: National Cover Crop Survey Report Reveals Latest Trends Thanks, Noah. Well, right now I'm standing in the green cover cover crop plots. And while we're about to talk with Keith Burns, get a little tour of what's going on behind me, first, I want to talk with Ryan Heininger and Rob Myers about the newly released National Cover Crop Survey Report and some of the most interesting data that's come out from that so far. Rob Meyers: "31% of farmers are doing some type of cover crop grazing, and that's an increase from what we've seen in the past. Slightly more in the fall, but also some in the winter and spring and then a bit in the summer. But notably, many of them are saying that virtual fencing is really going to help. So we had a series of questions about virtual fencing. You can see more on that on the lack of fencing on page 53, some following pages on virtual fencing. So of the farmers that are already doing cover crop grazing, 85% said virtual fencing would lead them to increase cover crop grazing more themselves or just in general. So I think as we look over the next few years, that's going to be a big change in cover crop use is more grazing with more virtual fencing because if you haven't followed that story just a year ago was the beginning of when you could buy virtual fencing in the Midwest." "Before that you couldn't buy it. Out west, a couple of years it's been there, but there are now several companies selling virtual fencing. And although we still recommend a perimeter fence near a roadway, it really makes cover crop grazing much, much more easy and a very economical practice for producers." Keith Berns: "Cover crops can be an amazing tool for cattle. And the cover crop survey said about one in three, those users will graze their cover crops. I think for our customers, it's probably two and three. I would guess that 60 to 65% of everything that we sell is going to get grazed or at least has the intention of being grazed. This is one of those mixes. This is something we call it a stockpile mix. We can plant this in late June or early July after wheat harvest. And the intent on this is we're not grazing this until November, December, January. So we don't want to graze this early. This is going to be saved, this is going to be stockpiled and we're going to graze it into the winter months. So we specifically choose things that aren't going to fall over. We specifically choose things that are going to hold their forage value." "We're going to specifically choose things that still have the best nutritional quality. We can grow it during the heat of the summer. We can graze it during the cold of the winter. And so it gives producers another tool to be able to extend their grazing into a season where they normally might have to be buying hay or buying protein supplements, all of which costs money. But this is a relatively inexpensive way to get some of that protein, get some of that energy out there. And then you can graze this along with corn stalks or you can graze it in conjunction with other things. And like what Rob said, if you have collars on those cattle, you will get probably twice the forage utilization out of any of these mixes we're going to talk about. You literally can double the value of it with collars on your cattle versus just turning them into the whole field all at once. It's going to be a game changing technology." Lots of good cover crop info on display as always. Well, I'm sure Noah Newman is somewhere around here and if I had to take a guess, I'm guessing he's probably right here at the Agronomy Zone. How Yield Contest-Winning Strip-Tiller Tests New Products on His Farm That's right Mackane, you found me here in the Agronomy Zone. This is new to the show this year. A bunch of companies testing cutting edge inputs and one of the interesting things here in the Agronomy Zone was a panel discussion featuring Chad Henderson. He's a high yielding strip tiller for Madison, Alabama. And he was asked, "How do you set up these on-farm trials when you're testing all these new products?" "We're obviously going to do it in small strips. That's number one. We're going to do it in a strip trial. I'm going to do it irrigated and then I'm going to do it on dry land as well. I want to see what happens with it when the weather, how big a play the weather is. Because remember I'm only irrigated on. I'm in, like I said, Alabama and you're only irrigated on 25% of my acres. So the weather plays a big role in what we got to do. And then so me spending that extra money has to play in that role. So I want to treat it on that dry land acre before I move it in from other, but then I need to know so both sides of it. But I'm going to do it in strip trials. First of all, it's going to be, I check everything in four to 500 feet strips." "I'm going to weigh it there. And then after that, I'm going to run it in 24 row passes every other pass for let's say three to five across the field where I get a good streak of it, where I can have the digital data and we can also have the weigh scale tickets as well." BASF Experts Share No-Till Crop Protection Insights Well, I'm at one of the most popular booths of the whole show. BASF, just been crawling with foot traffic all week. Why don't we head inside and see what kind of conversations Jared Roskamp, technical service representative with BASF has been having with no-tillers, strip tillers, and cover crops here at the show this week? "We've had a lot of great opportunities to start with waterhead management. I think whether we're doing cover crops or even no-till, that's a weed we all tend to struggle with. And so things like Zigua Pro or even our new brand, we've got one we're launching called Paraxor, which we just obtained state labels for in a lot of the states that people would be here visiting from. Those are two great burn down products to get us started. Really, as we think about weed control as a whole, we want to make sure we start clean and especially in no-till situations, we're not running the iron through there. This is a way to start us off clean so we get the best opportunity for long-term or season long controlled waterhead. So those two products, obviously Ziguil Pro being a little bit older, but still very successful and a good foundation, as well as Peraxo, which is our new, I would say very powerful burn down." "And we're even seeing some excellent activity on waterhemp when it comes to knockdown with that as well as marestail and otherweeds. So it's really just a nice fit as far as no-till and cover crop farmers go as far as a tool for managing weeds. Yeah. So from an agronomic perspective, we don't want to forget fall herbicides. So if you get far enough south, I work in the Missouri kind of southern Illinois corridor. We do a lot of fall herbicides. So that may be something as we get some of the harvest out, depending on the kind of moisture we've had, that's something we can do to hold some of those winter annuals back. As I think about my no-till farmers, marestail's one of our biggest concerns. We've got products like Distinct, even just putting down a base layer of even some Zidua even in the fall." "We've done some work with that to try and help hold some of those weeds back has been a very valuable start to next year to where we've got that wider window to get that clean start. So first thing I'll be talking about is fall herbicides. And then two, I would say let's evaluate our programs from this year as well. If we're going through with the combine and we saw some messes, whether it's in corn or soybeans, making sure we look for adjustments that are needed in our program to improve year over year." Stay tuned for more content from BASF as well as other content from all around Farm Progress Show in the coming weeks. Now let's find out where in the world is John Dobberstein. PTx ArrowTube Engineer Discusses Seed-Orienting Delivery System Thank you Mackane. I'm John Dobberstein at No-Till Farmer. Well, one of the things you hear from farmers, including David Hula many years ago is we have all these innovations with planters, but why can't we put the corn kernel in the furrow right side up instead of upside down? You don't want to lose growing degree days or yields. So the folks at PTx had a five-year R&D product before they designed a new product, Arrowtube, and it guides seed all the way down into the furrow and deposits the seed in the proper orientation so you don't lose any yield or any growing degree days. "When we place a seed with a tip down, it knows exactly what it needs to do. We see that caliopto go straight up vertical and we see the radical root dive straight down. That seed's not confused. Versus in traditional systems, when we put seed in the ground, it's random. The embryo might be down and that's where we see the cork screwing. Sometimes when we dig plants, we see that caliopto all twisted around. Well, that's all wasted GDU and wasted time getting to the surface. And so the goal of this is if every seed is put in the furrow the same, they should all get to the surface at relatively the same 24 hour window, which is the sweet spot to push yield numbers. And that's what we're after. The second benefit is if we're planting in this direction and the embryo is facing the adjacent row, the first set of leaves will come out and we'll move towards the adjacent row." "That opens up maximized sunlight capture and that's what we like out of the system too. We want those leaves going out into open space, grabbing that sunlight and pushing for better plant health and better yield potentially." There are a number of other planter innovations out here at the PTx booth as growers continue to look ways to be more efficient and effective with their planting and seeding. Root Architecture: Matching Hybrids to the Way You Plant Here at the show, it's always important to find your right line and hit your mark, boom, whether it's with the putter or the right hybrid. And that's exactly what Jim Schwartz, head of Practical Farm Research for Beck's Hybrids was talking about inside the Beck's tent. Finding the right root architecture for your unique no-till system will increase your odds of success. "A great tie-in then for no-till might be this. Long-term no-tillers tend to experience nutrient stratification. Not good, not bad. It's just the reality of it, right? So one of the things you can think about is if I have a very horizontal root architecture and a very vertical root architecture, some of the work we've done at University of Illinois is teaching us that that root architecture can drive big differences in the response of the root architecture to the management system. So if I have a lot of fertility in that narrow profile, I'm guessing, now we're doing some studies on this very topic this year, but I'm guessing horizontal architectures might do better in those environments. Conversely, if I ban my fertility directly beneath the row, what we've learned, we've done again, five years of work with Illinois, three years with Purdue, two years with Nebraska Lincoln." "And what we've learned is in those environments, when I ban fertility, vertically root architecture's 14 plus bushel better in those environments. So again, matching the way you farm to the way the hybrid wants to be managed and its root architecture, it de-risks the failures and increases your odds of success." Video of the Week: Marion Calmer’s Short Corn Takeaways Man, it is getting hot out here. We got to start wrapping up the show. So we'll go to our video of the week now. I caught up with no-till legend Marion Calmer back there to talk about one of the hottest topics here at the show this week, short corn. "The new and exciting thing that we're seeing in agriculture now is this new short corn or smart corn, if you will, that shorter in height, but it's less likely to blow over and it also has a little higher yield because we're not putting quite so much material. So short corn going to be down here. These are some stalks that we had from last year and our regular corn is going to be up here. So what we're understanding is if you do both of these in 30 inch rows, it's probably not as big an advantage. But if you take the short corn, put it in 15 inch rows, up the population, that's where we get the powder in the keg and that's where it really makes the higher yield. So this is my third year of growing short corn, and this is a year we're going to have the 15 inch right next to the 30. "Hopefully we can get you some footage this fall, have some yield results for you to take a look at. But just remember, it's not a complete solution, but it certainly helps on a windy day that it's less likely to fall down, but it's got to be in 15 inch rows to make it work." What do you think? Send me your thoughts and story ideas to Nnewman@LessiterMedia.com. Thanks for watching. Until next time, for more stories visit no-tillfarmer.com, striptillfarmer.com and covercropstrategies.com.