Larry Hoover, an Ohio farmer, has been a SMART-TILL® dealer for five years. "We have customers here in the Corn Belt using it in the fall; they set it pretty aggressive in the fall," he says. "In the spring, they'll run it perhaps a second time or if they didn't get the fall work done, they'll set the gangs more straight in the spring to dry things out."
Larry also uses the SMART-TILL® on his farm. "The first time we used it, we purchased a barn full of hog manure from a neighbor. Our plan was for him to spray that on top and we were going to chisel it in the next day," Larry says. "Well, we couldn't do that the next day. It was too smeary on top. It took 48 hours before it was dry enough that we could chisel."
"So we took the SMART-TILL® out and started to run in front of where he was applying manure. And I couldn't believe it. In 2 1/2 hours I could have been in there to chisel or doing anything. It made that hog manure go right straight down into the soil. Got it off the surface, got the stink away. And that really helped tremendously," he says.
SMART-TILL® plays an important role in Larry's pasture too. He gives his cows 40 acres of land in the winter planted in corn or soybeans and aerial seeded in rye. He subsidizes this with round bales. In the spring, he takes the SMART-TILL® out to loosen the packed soil so water can get through.
To make his field work, Larry tried chisel plowing and in-line ripping/deep tilling. Then he discovered SMART-TILL®.
"It doesn't destroy the soil structure; you can haul round bales out without making big, deep tracks in the soil, and it'll hold cows up much better," he says. "In the spring we run the SMART-TILL® once with a light-tillage machine over the top of it to smooth things up a little more and plant. That's all that's done to it."