Agriculture Working For You: Growing Corn, Soybeans, and a Healthy Environment

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- Hello, I'm Leon Ressler, agronomy educator with Penn State Extension here in Lancaster County.

On our farm we grow corn and soybeans.

We use a planting method known as no-till.

This involves using a specialized planter which has a steel disk which opens a slot in the soil.

The seed is placed in this slot, and then closing the wheels closes the slot.

The advantage of this is that it enables one to plant with very minimal soil disturbance.

Back in the day, farmers would plow, often using a moleboard plow which inverted the soil and followed with one or two passes with a disk.

This made a very fine seedbed, looked very nice, and it controlled weeds well, but it left the soil very vulnerable to erosion.

If a heavy thunderstorm came along there was a very strong possibility that that soil would wash off the field and into a local stream.

Using the no-till method of planting, we have reduced the risk of soil erosion significantly.

Another practice we use here on our home farm to reduce the risk of soil erosion is cover crops.

Cover crops are planted in the fall after the crop harvest.

They grow all winter, and then they're either harvested or killed in the spring.

We use winter rye, here, and in the spring I harvest the rye and bale it for straw.

Some farmers harvest their cover crop for feed.

Other simply kill the cover crop and plant into the residue that's remaining when they're about to establish the spring crops.

Either way, the cover crops, combined with no-till, are two practices that contribute substantially to reducing the risk of soil erosion.

Now let's meet our neighbor, Andrew Britton, who does our planting for us.

- Hello, my name is Andrew Brinton owner/operator of Riverview Farms Custom, here today at Leon Ressler's farm planting soybeans.

We'll walk through the planter, explain how it works.

First pass through the field, the no-till coulter, it's a turbo blade, on there, cuts the initial ditch for the seed.

Then the row cleaner comes along, brushes away any debris, prepares the clean seedbed for the opener disk.

There's two disks, here, that cut a V-trench where a tube can drop the seed into the trench.

There's also a seed firmer, here, to make sure that the seed meets the bottom of the ditch.

And then, here, we have the closing wheels, two wheels that close the ditch.

- Our corn crop will be harvested around the middle of October.

The crop will be sold to a local feed mill who'll make it into various animal feeds.

It could be for dairy, poultry, or swine production.

Eventually the animal products such as milk or eggs, chicken or pork, will end up in your grocery store shelves.

Our soybean crop will be harvested in early October.

It will be sold to a soybean processing plant where the plant will extract soybean oil from the beans.

This oil will be used for many products, but one of them that will show up on your grocery store shelves is vegetable oil for cooking.

There are also industrial uses for this oil.

It could be used for paint or fuel such as biodiesel.

As soon as the corn and soybean harvest is complete the rye cover crop will be planted so it can become well established before winter.

So the cycle of seed time and harvest on the farm continues.

Farmers work all year long to keep your grocery shelves filled with food.

Thank you to everyone involved in the process that makes ham, eggs, chicken, beef and milk possible.

I encourage everyone to support your local farmers and small businesses by shopping and buying local.

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