Agronomic Design

It’s important to leave behind the right amount and type of crop residue at harvest time. And while residue is good because it helps build up soil organic matter, it can become a problem if it is so thick that it slows down the warming up of soil and drying down in the spring.

Managing residue starts at harvest and can have spring and fall tillage considerations as well. Anything that a grower can do to evenly size and spread the residue at harvest will help fields maximize the creation of organic matter during the winter months, while tillage tools can aid in further sizing and mixing crop residue. For true no-till operations, the planter or seeder must be equipped to part and/or cut through residue while precisely placing the seed in a wide range of crop residue conditions.

Learn how these Case IH products can help you manage your crop residue:

Axial-Flow^® combines choppers and spreaders
Heavy-Offset Disk Harrows 
True-Tandem™ disk harrows 
Ecolo-Tiger^® disk rippers 
Ecolo-Till™ in-line rippers 
True-Tandem™ vertical tillage tools
Speed-Tiller™ High-Speed Disk
VT-Flex™ 435 Vertical Tillage Tool

Good soil tilth is important as it affects all of the processes occurring in the soil matrix, the most important of which is movement of oxygen and water needed for plant growth. Maintaining moisture in the soil to get through short-term droughts in the middle of summer is key too. By providing good organic matter through the use of a cover crop and minimizing compaction, growers can enhance soil tilth and drought resistance in their fields.

Controlling traffic, utilizing guidance and timing technology to cover more ground in fewer passes are all ways to minimize field compaction and protect the soil.

Learn more about these Case IH products designed to minimize compaction:

Steiger^® Series
Patriot^® 50 Sprayers
AFS AccuGuide™
Ecolo-Tiger^® 875
Ecolo-Til™ 2500

Soil with a rough surface hinders proper seed germination and plant growth, ultimately leading to lost yield potential. Case IH found that up to 10% of seed planted can fail to emerge or develop a full ear at harvest because of cloddy, uneven conditions. Large soil clods can cause planter row units to bounce. This makes it challenging to control planter depth and maintain seed placement accuracy for uniform plant spacing. Large clods can also leave holes, which can lead to slow, uneven germination of seeds, and the different heights of the soil surface makes for variable moisture and temperature levels.

Tiger-Mate™ 255 Field Cultivator
Vibra-Tine™ 265 S-Tine Field Cultivator
AFS Soil Command™

Planter manufacturers often talk about picket fence stands, which focuses exclusively on in-row seed spacing and accurate populations, because those two features are easiest to control. However, the first four agronomic principles listed above impact what many agronomists call photocopy plants or uniformity of the plants. While both picket fence stands and photocopy plants are important, the biggest impact on yield is photocopy plants.

Learn how these Case IH products can help you create photocopy plants:

1200 Series Early Riser^® planters
2000 Series Early Riser^® planters
Precision Disk™ air drills
Flex Hoe™ air drills

Often, the biggest risk associated with plant food availability is a financial one. Timely and efficient application of key nutrients is essential to helping plants thrive and using nutrients more efficiently can translate into fertilizer savings of anywhere from $20-$30 per acre.

A big challenge in applying nutrients is the amount of residue left on the soil surface - the nutrients need to get down into the soil to be capture, not left on the surface. Case IH application toolbars use a combination of a high-residue coulter, a knife and shank assembly, along with a disk sealer to make fields less susceptible to nutrient loss.

Learn more about making your fields less susceptible to nutrient loss:

Case IH Nutri-Placer fertilizer applicators
Nutri-Tiller 955

Protecting the yield potential of your crop requires getting the right amount of product applied at the right time. Application equipment technology should be designed to get you into fields earlier and deliver a quality application consistently on time, every time. Yield loss can occur when the application of nutrients, herbicides, insecticides and fungicides are delayed, prevented, or not properly applied.

Our agronomically-designed AIM Command FLEX II™  technology delivers independent nozzle control and turn compensation ensuring that chemicals are properly distributed. This technology provides a constant application pressure over a wide range of speeds on our Patriot sprayers, meaning consistent droplet size and consistent coverage.

Learn more about our agronomically-designed sprayers:

Patriot® 50 sprayers

Producers should lose no more than 1 bushel of corn per acre each harvest, but some producers see losses of 3-4 bushels per acre. The cost of that grain left in the field adds up quickly, so you need equipment that can help you overcome harvesting challenges. Our Axial-Flow combines are designed around these core principles to improve your harvest:

• Simplicity – designed with fewer moving parts for unmatched reliability and easier serviceability
• Crop adaptability – versatile enough to harvest over 80 types of grains in many conditions
• Grain quality – gentle grain-on-grain threshing to minimize grain damage
• Grain savings – thorough threshing and efficient separation put more grain in the tank
• Matched capacity - automatically matching the feeder and header speeds with the ground speed

Learn more about our combines and heads:

Axial-Flow® combines
Corn and grain heads