Opening Remarks: Ron St. Croix. Kenmare, North Dakota

The type of drill you own influences your fertilizer program.

I own a Concord 4010 - 40 feet wide with 10 inch spacing spreading the seed 5 inches wide in the row. The Concord allows a great variety of fertilizer methods due to the wide seed spread and the heavy shank.

My farm is 25 miles from town which is a long ways to haul anhydrous tanks. I try to knife in the anhydrous in the fall along with Treflan on some fields to spread out the work load in the spring.

With the Concord, I have many choices at seeding time. If the anhydrous is fall applied, I put 18-46-0 down the tube with the seed using a 12 inch sweep. If only a low amount of nitrogen is needed, I blend urea and 18-46-0. In most cases there is about 20 pounds of potash blended with the dry fertilizer. The wide seed spread will allow me to put down as much as 60 pounds of nitrogen and potash with the seed.

I plan to put an anhydrous attachment on my Concord this spring. With the heavy shank of the Concord, I can apply the anhydrous with a farmland back swept knife, or with D-J tubes with the sweep, or a no-till opener such as the Anderson opener.

I farm in South Eat Saskatchewan with my father and brother. We farm about 2000 acres and have a 200 head cow/calf operation. I also have a herd of elk. Our crops include: canola, wheat, barley and oats, we are also looking into growing peas.

For years we farmed in the traditional way, but as times changed, so did our methods of farming. We originally placed fertilizer with the seed. Then we went to the deep banding method which meant working the land two or three times before seeding. Economics and times have brought more change. Now we zero till or minimum till placing fertilizer and seed in one pass using an Air Seeder with Key 2 Boots were manufactured by Key Ag. Ventures, in Red Deer, Alberta. This method places seed on 6" centers, dry fertilizer with seed or Deep Bands, also placing anhydrous ammonia (NH3), 3" to the side of the seed and 2.5" deeper than seed. After seeding we prefer to harrow pack as this seals and levels the land, leaving an even straw cover. We think this is very important with any type of seeding.

We find that a person has to cut-down on production costs and this is one way of doing it. Fewer trips over the fields means fewer tractor hours, less fuel and lower costs of maintenance and repairs. Straw is not a great problem to us because we bale so much for the cattle. We use a John Deer combine with a standard straw chopper and no chaff spreader. As of yet we have not experienced any problems.

1992 was the first year we used this method. We zero tilled 50% of our acres and minimum tilled the rest. We found that our zero tilled crops yielded the best overall and our inputs were less.

In 1993, because of the wet spring, we were forced to work 75% of our acres before seeding but zero tilled the rest, again the zero tilled crops yielded just as good, if not better than the acres that were tilled.

In 1993, we did a test plot of 1.2 acres. We seeded canola into standing wheat stubble. This wheat stubble was really heavy and about two feet tall. I placed 76 pounds of NH3 and 80 pounds of blended fertilizer (15-27-0-11) on this and our germination was exceptional. Our test plot did well all year. End result was 30 bushels per acre. We did not see any problems with the amount of fertilizer or with the large amount of straw.

For 1994 we have decided to go zero till on everything. Our crop rotations will change a bit for the next year, or until the price of wheat improves.