PONTIAC, Ill. — The sheep are in the cornfield — and chickens too.
As part of a new high-yield study of strip-cropping practices, Precision Planting’s lead commercial agronomist Jason Webster has introduced sheep and chickens in an autonomous grazing pen to test plots at the company’s Precision Technology Institute farms in Pontiac, Illinois.
The goal of strip cropping is to allow more sunlight to get to corn plants to increase yields and grow a second shorter crop between the strips that can be harvested — or in this case, grazed.
Corn yields in the four-year study were great, but soybean yields, not so much, Webster says. So this year, the sister strip crop is cover crops, which offer grazing opportunities.
The grazers — sheep and chickens this year — have a home in a Stock Cropper, a prototype grazing pen developed in Iowa, Webster says.
The new equipment is at the research and development stage.
“We’ll see if it works,” he says.
The Stock Cropper autonomously moves 100 feet a day. With a heavier mix of cover crops, it would only move about 40 feet a day, allowing the livestock to graze on the cover crop strips, Webster says.
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“It gives them all the food and water they need,” he says.
The technology includes solar panels, water collection and comfortable shade for the livestock as they dine on millet, sudan grass, radishes, or other species in the cover crop mix.
Wooly sheep graze on one side and chubby chickens on the other. Webster says for the best market value, he would normally sell the chickens at a lower weight, but they are doing such a good job as manure producers, they are still here.
“The amount of fertilizer is incredible,” he says.
This resource could also help cut future fertilizer costs and improve profit, he says. It also saves him from hauling in or spreading manure, which might be offensive to his neighbors at the edge of the city of Pontiac.
Webster has already learned a lot in the study over the last three years. He says the corn block he planted was large the first year because he wanted to work with the equipment he had. At that time, farmers who came to the research farm to see his experiment scolded him for letting equipment dictate his efforts. So following their advice, he worked with smaller blocks. The corn got more sunlight and yields went up.
He says four rows of corn, or about 10-feet-wide strips, work best. They must be grown east-west, not north-south so the lower crops get sunlight.
“Of all the things we did on this farm in 2021, strip cropping came in second in return on investment with an increase of $166 per acre,” Webster says.
In 2022, strip cropping brought in an impressive 398 bu./acre of corn. The goal is to repeat that and improve it this year, he says.
In coming years, he would like to introduce pigs and turkeys to the system.
