This past week I've partially become a believer in deep ripping......actually zone building soils. Here are a few photos of some bean plants of ours that we used a Brillion Zone Commander on last fall. First of all, most of our beans are drought stressed........fairly bad. In a lot of fields there are a lot of pods but there isn't anything in them. The pods aren't filling well which tells me we will be combining beans the size of BB's. Looks to me like the ripped beans have about 25-30 pods (most look to be 3 bean) per plant at a 148,000 final count on 20" rows. The big difference is, that these pods are filling nicely and looks like they will have average sized beans in them.

Of all the beans around here the ones which were planted last and/or into wheat stubble look the best. Wheat stubble was the last to get planted because it was the wettest. This field in particular was planted about 3/4 of the way through bean planting on 5/28. The field 1 mile away from this which was planted with the same beans on the same day doesn't look nearly as good. This field is in it's 7th year of continuous no-till. All of our other bean fields are short and damaged.

I know deep ripping is expensive, but of all the reading and digging I've done, with our no-till systems one of the biggest things we are short on in our soil is oxygen. They are tightly bound and getting worse. Yes, earthworm populations are crazy, but they appear to not be doing their job as well as they should. The scale will tell the truth in the end I guess.