Lately in my opinion, in Michigan it has been too dry to cultivate in the summer. This past year if you would have cultivated it would have hurt you more than helping because of the moisture loss.
Granted I don't know what John730D's cousin is running for equipment but we can't cultivate for under roughly $3 an acre (3020 burns around 5 gallons an hour, and can go over about 5 acres per hour, running 6 row) Then you still don't get the weeds in between the corn. Plus you lose a lot of your moisture when you cultivate and if we have another dry year like last year (Michigan) that hurts in a bad way. We don't grow any round up ready corn but weeds aren't really a problem in corn. Just sprayed once with conventional and let it go. In a bad wet year where the clay will cap we will cultivate but we only touch that thing about once every 5 years though.
For soybeans we grow all round up ready and plant 7.5 inch rows. If we wait until the beans have started to fill the rows before we spray the first time we usually get away with only spraying once. By the time the weeds start to come back they are shaded out by the beans since they are planted so close. We use generic round up with a surfactant and an anti-foam and in the end with fuel and all runs about $10 an acre. Most years we only spray once, some years twice but they are so much cleaner when you combine them it's amazing. You don't get moisture loss in the soil which helps your yield and with really clean beans you can combine them faster using less fuel and less time.
So for us, the difference between spraying and cultivating is around $7 an acre, which with todays prices means about 2 bushel of corn or a bushel of beans and I feel we lose that when we cultivate so I don't think it's worth it. But we do our own spraying. If you are paying someone else, then it becomes a different story.
That's my 2 cents. I don't like to cultivate. Not the actual cultivating itself, but the side effects, I would rather spray.
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Today's Featured Article - Listening to Your Tractor - by Curtis Von Fange. Years ago there was a TV show about a talking car. Unless you are from another planet, physically or otherwise, I don’t think our internal combustion buddies will talk and tell us their problems. But, on the other hand, there is a secret language that our mechanical companions readily do speak. It is an interesting form of communication that involves all the senses of the listener. In this series we are going to investigate and learn the basic rudimentary skills of understanding this lingo.
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