Tillage After Wheat Harvest – A Good Idea?

Aug 07, 2018

By Steve Culman

After winter wheat harvest, it’s not an uncommon sight in Ohio to see producers tilling their fields to incorporate wheat residue. These fields are often left fallow until the following spring before there are crops planted again. But is this a good idea? Of course, the answer will depend on the goals of using tillage, but from a soil conservation perspective the answer is nearly always ‘no’.

Tillage after wheat with no crop planted until the following spring will leave soil exposed for nine months or more, giving the erosive forces of wind and water time to reduce and devalue one of the most important assets producers have – the soil on their farms. Leaving the soil exposed for long periods of time nearly always increases erosion, increases sediment-bound phosphorus and nitrogen which compromise water quality, decreases the ability to build organic matter through roots of living crops and decreases soil food web community size and diversity. Even in fields with minimal to no slope, soil erosion occurs when soil is not protected. Better soil conservation practices would be leaving wheat residue in place, double-cropping soybean or planting a cover crop to keep the soil covered.

Soil erosion is not a new issue, but remains a primary constraint to soil fertility and health in farmers’ fields. Remembering two primary tenants of soil conservation are relevant here: 1) keep soil covered with plants or residues at all times, and 2) maximize living roots in fields to maintain soil biology and organic matter. Producers should carefully consider their options when balancing short-term goals with long-term strategies of building soil fertility and health.

Source: osu.edu

Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.