Whether your ground is in conventional tillage, strip-till or no-till, next spring’s planting season starts in the fall, at harvest.
“How good a job we do spreading residue behind our harvesters makes a big difference in how uniform our corn stand will be next spring and how uniform the growth and development will be,” says Ken Ferrie, Farm Journal Field Agronomist and owner of Crop-Tech Consulting, near Heyworth, Ill.
The goal is to spread the residue so uniformly that you can’t tell where the combine went through the field.
How you accomplish that requires a combination of at least five things specific to spinners, including:
- how fast you run them
- where you land on the spinners
- how your spinners are set
- the condition of the spinners
- where the product is coming off of your shaker plate onto the spinners.
“All that’s going to be part of it,” he says. “When we get too far forward and we throw residue behind; if we get too far back we throw it up around the tires. We shouldn’t have residue mound up on the axles and beat the back of the combine tires.”
In the following, brief video (under 2 minutes), Ferrie provides practical steps you can take to spread residue effectively. Watch it here:
