Five things you need to know about managing crop residue

Essential from an agronomic and economic perspective, crop residue management can often be overlooked during the busy harvest season. Properly managed crop residue, including straw and chaff, can improve soil productivity and establish stronger seedbeds for optimal seeding conditions in the spring.

Today’s combine headers are wider than ever, making it difficult for many factory choppers to spread crop residues like straw and chaff evenly. Uniform and wide distribution of straw and chaff residues is essential for proper seedbed establishment.

Managing crop residue is an efficient way to improve soil health. Crop residue management is often understood as retaining leftover crop materials to keep soil surfaces covered, protecting against nutrient loss and erosion. Residues, including straw and chaff can easily be incorporated into the soil the following spring during regular cultivation, adding high-quality organic matter to the soil. Residues can  improve physical properties of soil that help with water-holding capacity and drainage, help retain ideal soil temperatures and improve the soil acidity and availability of micronutrients.

Combining uniformly cut straw and chaff (residue size) and spread that matches the combine header are essential to creating optimal seeding conditions. Without uniform residue distribution, fields can be left with sections that can’t be seeded evenly, leading to shallower planting depths and even seeding left on top of the ground. This ultimately leads to poor crop emergence. Properly sized and uniformly cut residue creates ideal conditions for microbial action that leads to faster breakdown of residues, adding nutrients back into the soil.

Evenly sized and spread residue reduces problems like equipment plugging, poor seed placement, hair-pinning, toxic chaff and disease, weed and insect infestations. For example, hair-pinning is caused by poorly cut (and spread) straw from the previous year’s harvest doesn’t breakdown during the winter and spring prior to seeding. As a result, straw gets caught in the seeding equipment during spring seeding. Hair-pinning can create seeding equipment problems, causing the seeder to plug up, reduce the performance of the equipment and ultimately leaving a poorly established field.

Plenty of harvest residue solutions are available. One of the leading residue distribution systems is Redekop’s Maximum Air Velocity (MAV) chopper system that finely cuts and spreads crop residue across the width of the cutterbar. The MAV straw chopper creates uniform chaff and residue distribution to prepare seedbeds in the fall and eliminate common residue management problems. Redekop’s Seed Control Unit (SCU) takes residue management to the next level, providing Harvest Weed Seed Control that can also be integrated into combines to destroy up to 98% of the harvestable weeds in a single pass.