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Driftless SW Wisconsin | Chad,
There are examples, especially this year, where deep ripping (but not turning all soil over) has been helpful in severe drought areas. However, I would be careful not to overreact to this particular dry year - unless it turns out to be more common in SD.
What I have also seen is that those that deep rip every year will often destroy the structure of their soil and that's not good either. This also gets into the compaction issues discussed in the thread below. Controlling combine and grain cart traffic also helps keep air in the soil. I think if you look at the axle loads common running through your fields pictured, especially in the high yielding corn years, I lot of that ground has been driven over.
What seems to be a middle ground is to deep rip maybe every 3-4 years which means you don't need to cover all ground in one year. Obviously ripping should only be done in the fall in most of the corn belt.
We have some customers who deep rip occasionally in a strip till system, then run our strip till unit over the top of the ripped slots in the spring to make them plantable and clean them up and line them up for the planter.
I hope the recent rains helped salvage some of your crops. There was an amazing transformation around Mitchell in the past two weeks.
Jim at Dawn
Edited by Jim 8/23/2006 12:27
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Maybe there's something to deep ripping periodically??
