Cultivating The 2020 Corn Crop | Knocking Over Corn 

I did a lot of cultivating for my uncle when I was a teenager, he had me lay down and take a 20-30 minute nap after lunch. He figured it paid for itself so I wasn’t falling asleep and tearing out a bunch of corn.

Nice video , I enjoyed it. Nothing wrong with cultivating. I used to do it back in the’80’s. Corn always looks better where you cultivate.

Looks like a great time to avoid distractions. I bet it's pretty peaceful out there on the 4020 in the middle of a field, as long as it's not raining. It's like a throw-back to a simpler lifetime (before ours).

We cultivated EVERYTHING... cotton, corn, grain sorghum, and soybeans. We had two cultivators-- a Lilliston rolling cultivator, and a Deere RM rigid shank sweep-type cultivator. The rolling cultivator was used for the first cultivation, usually just about 2-3 weeks after planting, so in crops FAR shorter than this-- cotton would be in the first or second true-leaf stage, maybe 3 inches tall, and sorghum would be about half the height of your corn. We farmed on 40 inch raised beds, so basically you just dropped the cultivator and ran... we didn't use sway blocks or stabilizers so that the coulters and trailing sweeps could guide the cultivator down the middle of the furrows between rows, and we usually cultivated at about 6 mph, looked like you were doing about 3.5-maybe 4 here. Course it helps having a tapered bed to "guide" the cultivator all you have to do is keep the front wheels centered in the middles and away you go. Sometimes the first cultivation WAS done slightly slower, at 5-5.5 mph just to keep from throwing too much soil and burying young crop plants. The Lilliston rolling cultivator was much more forgiving in this regard, because you could take an impact wrench and reset the gang angles so that they were very shallow almost straight angle to the row so they didn't move much soil just broke it up and knocked out weed seedlings. The second and third cultivations were done with the sweep type Deere RM-- it has five sweeps per middle, with two narrow sweeps up by the crop rows, two slightly larger center sweeps to provide overlap and root out weed seedlings in the middles and row flanks, and a single 12-14 inch trailing sweep going down the center of the middle in back, equipped with "buzzard wings" or small adjustable steel "elephant ears" behind the sweep bolt between the sweep and the shank, to throw more soil out of the middles back up onto the bed flanks to either side, slicing out any weeds missed by the center sweeps and throwing the soil back up to either side to bury any potential weed seedlings that might have made it through. In cotton we'd usually cultivate a fourth time, switching back to the Lilliston since it had more clearance, adjusting the gangs to a steeper angle to throw soil up under the stalks of cotton to bury any seedling weeds, and the rear center of the middle sweep with buzzard wings to throw soil up as much as possible onto the bed flanks to bury anything that survived the rolling spider wheel gangs. I had even set up the RM with a pair of nozzles on either side of the rows, to spray a band of chemical under the cotton plants to take out late germinating weeds when necessary, sort of like how you fixed your cultivator to apply nitrogen, only through fixed nozzles up off the ground. We had a spray tank mounted on the front of the tractor for spraying pre-plant incorporated herbicides like Trifluralin and disking it in pre-plant, and then for banding herbicides behind the planter (or broadcast spraying pre-emerge herbicides in corn and sorghum and soybeans) and so it was easy to hook up the same sprayer setup to the cultivator with a single hose coming back from the tractor. Anyway, you're right about the benefits of cultivation... crop always takes a growth spurt after a cultivation, and in dry weather, when our gumbo soils would start to crack, a light cultivation would fill the cracks with loose dry soil, preventing moisture from being pulled out into the air through the cracks. We would usually sidedress fertilizer before lay-by of the crop using a knife applicator rented from the fertilizer dealer... They had pre-plant knife applicators with the knives centered on the beds directly under the row, and side-dress applicators with back-swept knives that ran about 6-8 inches to one side of the row... Later! OL J R : )

I'd have never thought that cultivating would have made it harder for the sprayer. . that ka for teaching me something new today.

Very cool action shots from cultivator,thanks for the update Travis

Growing up it was known as "cultivator blight" 🤣🤣

It does a nice job

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and incites. That’s an interesting dilemma. Always nice to see the corn growing. Stay safe, wishing you and your family the best.

Talk about concentration Wow ! You sure got it Travis. great presentation I must say thanks

Wow Travis those rows are really tight on the tractor, thanks for the video 👍

Well growning up we cultivated corn twice and beans once. I enjoyed it cause it was so peaceful. When ever the call cultivator or the operator got off my dad called it cultivater blight.

corn is looking good travis thanks for the video

Wow great action shots! Not a job I would want to do. Thanks for the video Travis!

A good test would be to cultivate half the field and let the other half go and see what happens - interesting video :)

Sometimes volunteer corn is caused by corn borers or just a characteristic of the hybrid with week Shank and several repeated windy days , corns looking good

👍👌🇨🇦❤, well narrated

Get yourself a jd 2040 great little cultivating tractor

It would be interesting to see if you get more bushels per acre by doing cultivating or not doing it❓Maybe like half the field with cultivating the other half not❓ Thanks for sharing👍‼️

Back about 1950, one of our neighbors hired some young guys from the Reform School in RedWing to help with farm chores. One of the kids said he was experienced with cultivating. They started him in the field. When he got to the end of the field he was four rows over with a trail of plowed up corn behind him. sad.

Great to kill weeds and volunteer corn with cultivator than chemical. Great for aeration like you said. Nice.

Before Roundup ready corn I had to cultivate to kill shattercane. I had a Buffalo Guidance to steer the cultivator. The sway blocks were not used. It cost me $4,000 to buy this so its sensor or wands made for doing the close cultivating.

Wheelman pro on 4020 FTW! Auto steer will keep you on row.

I would run over half the corn 😅 you did a great job👍

Travis can you tell the fields that you used the compelle cornhead ? We had a guidance system on our cultivator and we ran 2 12 row cultivators and basically layed the corn bye.

What do you think of no till?

I thought I r was the last one to around to do this

Does anyone have exact figures from the combine on yeild advantages from cultivating

R u doing giveaways soon

I know the studies here have showed that it dose not help and can hurt the corn more than any good you fo to it but maybe it’s just different area but our land grant college tells us not to do it

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Why do you care about volunteer corn in a cornfield?