Over 300 counties conducted the Crop Residue Management Survey in 2006. Compared to past surveys, for which the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) directed its field offices to collect data, the amount of data is significantly limited, but CTIC is working toward restoring the survey to its former national size.
According to Bill Kuenstler, acting national agronomist for NRCS, the agency’s decision not to direct field offices to collect data in 2006 was two fold. As Conservation Security Program (CSP) and Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) contracts increase, field office staffs are decreasing. The demand to service those programs is creating an environment that is extremely competitive for time. The second reason is that, in some circles, the survey is not believed to be as useful as it once was because the job of “selling conservation tillage is done.”
“I don’t think that’s right. We need to keep that information in front of farmers, all the benefits of no-till, of conservation tillage, not just erosion,” said Kuenstler.
But NRCS’s decision didn’t stop several states from collecting the data. “When we heard the federal support had been cut, we jokingly said, ‘that’s okay, we’ll just do our own survey.’ And the more we thought about it, we thought, yeah, we want to [conduct the survey],” said Paul Jasa, University of Nebraska extension engineer.
Several states in addition to Nebraska saw the value of the survey and conducted some amount of collection. Missouri, Iowa and Indiana contributed significant data.
Illinois was the only state to contribute all counties, and what they discovered was that for the first time, conservation tillage acres exceeded traditional tillage acres. According to an Illinois Department of Agriculture press release, “No-till farming, which involves planting seeds directly into the previous year’s crop residue without tilling the soil, was practiced in 51 percent of the state’s soybean fields, the first time the figure has topped 50 percent and a more than five percentage point improvement since the last survey in 2004.”
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Percent no-till 2006: The 2006 survey reveals more questions than answers about the direction of tillage in the U.S.
Maps courtesy of Scott Brunton |
On the ground
“We use [the survey] to zone in on particular areas,” says Alan Gulso, of the Illinois Department of Agriculture. The state of Illinois uses a cost-share incentive program to encourage new adoption and the Department of Agriculture and the local SWCDs are able to see what areas are lagging behind in adoption trends by looking at survey results. They then focus their outreach and education in those areas to encourage producers to take advantage of the cost share program.
Nebraska Extension discovered that in areas where farmers had switched from furrow irrigation to pivot irrigation, they were still using ridge-till. Education efforts are being designed to address those areas. “We’re doing a lot of spring planter field days the last weeks of March. We’re going out into residue that’s a little tougher than what producers normally encounter at planting time and showing them that their planting equipment can go no-till,” says Jasa.
Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri use the data in much the same way. But state and local governments are certainly not the only groups to use the survey data. It’s an important tool in the ag economy.
“The Survey is valued by a wide variety of companies. Even two years after the last complete Survey, CTIC continues to receive requests for data,” says Karen Scanlon, CTIC executive director. In much the same way states utilize the data to focus educational efforts, the ag industry uses the data to focus marketing and advertising.
The next generation of ag leaders is using the data as well. Robert Earnest, a master’s degree candidate at Mississippi State University is studying NBPT, the active ingredient in Agrotain, a urease inhibitor. “I needed to know the number of no-till cotton acres in Mississippi to show the need for an inhibitor, as an alternative to ammonium nitrate,” says Earnest. “The survey was really useful. It had all the data I was looking for.” And Earnest is not alone. Graduate students in fields of study ranging from agronomy, ag economics, and alternative energy studies use the data for their research.
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Percent no-till 2004: Results from the last full survey revealed a promising future for conservation tillage.
Maps courtesy of Scott Brunton |
What’s next?
Iowa NRCS agronomist Barbara Stewart has some concerns that there may be some bad news hidden in the exciting fall corn prices. “Just going from shop talk, I think there will be a lot more tillage next year,” says Stewart. Energy conservation is likely driving the adoption of conservation tillage, and particularly no-till. Producers want maximum corn yields while keeping their fuel costs down, but many believe that no-tilling corn into corn residue is risky as they go from a corn-bean rotation to corn-on-corn.
Without a national survey, how will Stewart, and everyone else concerned about conservation tillage, know if the shop talk predictions came true? How have rising fuel prices and rising corn prices affected the amount of tillage? Estimates and assumptions have proved wrong in the past.
In the beginning of the no-till movement, it was believed that the practice would only be successful on certain types of soil. Jim Lake, the first executive director of CTIC says that the early years of the CRM survey revealed a different story. “What we found was that there wasn’t necessarily a correlation between soil type and adoption. Farmers were figuring out how to do [no-till] in places where people initially thought the soil wouldn’t work for it,” says Lake. Without the nationwide CRM survey in the future, today’s guesses about how corn and fuel prices affect tillage trends seem to be as unsubstantiated as those early beliefs.
CTIC is considering a number of options in lieu of local county by county data collection, including continuing voluntary collection, seeking out new partners to conduct the survey and the use of satellite imagery. “We’re considering remote sensing as one of the options,” says CTIC board member Dr. Harold Reetz, President, Foundation for Agronomic Research. Reetz leads the CTIC committee supporting the Survey. Remote sensing would use satellite imagery to estimate amounts of crop residue left on the fields. There are many variables to work through using this method, Reetz explains, so CTIC is considering launching a pilot project on a small number of fields. Substantial amounts of data would be several years away. This method could provide more product options, but would take a couple of years to develop and implement.
“For today, it’s important for us to find a way to work with partners at the local level to collect tillage data, estimate residue cover and maintain the county-level assessment of conservation in agriculture,” says Reetz. “We have almost two decades worth of trends in conservation tillage; it would be a shame to lose it now.”
To find out more about the Crop Residue Management Survey and how you can support it, please contact Karen Scanlon at scanlon@conservationinformation.org or by calling (765) 494-9555.
