Decker
Decker
Marketing his own milk with the CO2-free certificate at the price level of oat or soy milk in 2026 is the idea of farmer Lutz Decker from Bierbergen, Lower Saxony. Along the way, he discovered his passion for conservation agriculture and became the first Novag customer in Germany in 2019.
“I didn’t buy the Novag 640 back then to be able to offer CO2-neutral milk seven years later. I didn’t have THE big plan. But in the end, one thing leads to another,” emphasizes the 44-year-old farmer. On the edge of the Hildesheim Börde with its very fertile soils (80-100 soil points), Lutz Decker runs a conventional farm together with his wife Anke and 19 employees with 230 hectares of arable land and permanent grassland as well as 500 cattle, 270 of which are dairy cows.
He also runs a 3 MW biogas plant with his brother-in-law Jan van Leeuwen, for which he provides contract support to around 60 farmers in terms of sowing, fermentation residue recycling and harvesting. Lutz Decker studied economics and social sciences of agriculture in Kiel, joined his parents’ farm in 2010 and took it over in 2018.
“After 13 years of biogas with intensive tillage and liquid manure fertilization as well as the use of catch crops for animal feed, we observed progressive soil compaction and increasing deficiency symptoms in the crops – especially in silage maize, despite our good soils and sufficient nutrients,” he explains.
Fertilization according to Kinsey
In his search for a solution, he first came into contact with Kinsey fertilization. This got the “ball rolling” and by 2019, Lutz Decker had already sampled all his land, including grassland, according to Kinsey and has been fertilizing it accordingly ever since. “Inevitably, I also came across the legendary long-term “Oberacker” trial in Switzerland,” he recalls. Since 1994, the cultivation systems no-till and plough as well as the standard fertilization system and the Kinsey system have been compared there. “Kinsey fertilization in combination with no-till is the best in terms of yield and quality.
Kinsey’s statement that it didn’t matter whether the soil was tilled or not reinforced my idea of reducing the tillage steps and mechanization intensity. This ultimately led to me investing in a prototype of today’s Novag TF 640 in 2019 and starting to convert our entire farm to the conservation farming system with no-till for the fall sowing of the same year,” he explains.
Until then, he and his father had cultivated the fields using the standard method with a plow furrow or mulch sowing. This is now his fourth fall tillage using the no-till method.
Rethinking required
For the new cultivation method, however, he mainly had to flip a switch in his head, as he had also enjoyed the classic teaching on fertilization, soil cultivation and seedbed preparation during his studies.
According to the FAO definition, conservation agriculture is based on three main principles: minimal mechanical cultivation of the soil within defined limits, organic mulch cover of at least 30 % immediately after direct sowing and a variety of crops comprising at least three species in the crop rotation.
“Our crop rotation includes sugar beet, maize, cereal GPS and a small proportion of soybeans. The silage maize goes almost entirely into the cattle’s stomachs and the cereal GPS, often triticale, into the biogas plant. Between the main crops, we establish one or even two catch crops, depending on whether a winter or summer harvest follows, and sow maize and sugar beet directly into the standing biomass,” explains the farmer.
His aim is to create a sufficiently thick layer of mulch that protects the cultivated field from drying out, weeds and erosion, cools it and feeds the earthworm. He uses both legume-containing and legume-free mixtures as catch crops, as well as rye. “However, this year we decided to harvest the catch crop as livestock feed due to a shortage of forage,” he admits.
Defying high resistance
No-till is not a respectable form of arable farming and is also referred to as “ugly farming”. “The dead catch crops in spring can be so thick that they significantly delay the development of the maize on our heavy soils. The plant usually makes up for this by August, but as a farmer you have to be able to put up with it,” says Lutz Decker, but is actually referring to his technology: “For no-till, you need a seeder that can place the seed of the following crop cleanly in the soil through a layer of mulch of any thickness, even if it is heavy like ours. This is one of the strengths of the Novag. With a coulter pressure of up to 500 kg, it even overcomes soil compaction in the track and its seed discs cut deeper than the seed horizon, so I don’t have to worry about hair-pinning.”
The power requirement depends on the condition of the soil and the tools you are working with. He himself has a 300 hp tractor in front of a 6 m seed drill, but it is clear that the work is getting easier every year because the soil is healthy and increasingly stable. “As a livestock farm with heavy soils, our biggest challenge in arable farming is the high load volumes and weights. We need Novag’s technology to overcome the high resistance in the soil during the first few years of conversion,” says farmer Decker with conviction. He also manages the soil load using a Controlled Traffic Farming (CTF) system and tire pressure control technology.
Simple and safe operation
He rarely sits on the machines himself and attaches great importance to simple and safe handling and operation of the technology for his drivers. This was another factor in his choice of Novag. He is referring to its IntelliForce system for intelligent, automatic coulter pressure control and depth control. “With the Novag as our first imported machine, we did something like a field test back then,” he smiles and praises the excellent support he still receives from the Novag team. He currently still receives spare parts from the factory in France, but they are also delivered to him within two days and this will improve further with the new Novag sales office in Hanover. Over time, he has adjusted details on his prototype Novag TF 640 with 25 cm row spacing: “For sugar beet sowing, for example, we have replaced the original corrugated seed hoses with smoother and thinner ones, thereby improving seed transport from the singulator to the openers. The singling performance of the Novag is sufficient for us. The T-shape of the seed coulters in combination with the deep disc cut are more important to me for Planting Green use than perfect singulation.”
A working width of six meters is oversized for his own arable farming, which is why he also uses his Novag on other farms and achieves an annual workload of just under 700 hectares. On average, his combination manages three hectares per hour. “Two of our no-till customers, like us, are consistently pursuing conservation agriculture,” he reports, but does not see himself as a missionary of this cultivation concept. “It requires a complete changeover and no-till is much more than mechanically planting seeds in unworked soil. It’s about developing nutrient dynamics in the soil and improving and stabilizing the soil structure,” explains farmer Decker.
Gain experience
He can see from the fine crumbly “cottage cheese structure”, which is already beginning to develop on many areas, that the calculation is working. However, the changeover also cost him a lot of money. Today, he recommends converting the areas to fertilizer before starting with no-till: “In autumn 2019, I tried the other way around on some areas. These seedings had a much harder time. In the cool, moist and firm soil, they lacked the mineralization that Kinsey fertilization provides.” He cannot fully explain all of the effects, but has now observed a clear difference between autumn and spring sowings, to which he believes he has an answer.
While the fall planting has always been unproblematic so far, he has already had two black eyes with the spring planting – the first time (2020) and again this year. “Both times, the sowing conditions were ideal, but there was no rainfall for around four weeks afterwards,” he recalls. He explains that no-till works without any problems in the fall, from “dry to wet”, referring to the soil condition at and after sowing. Conversely, under moist sowing conditions, some soils can crack in the area of the seed slot if they are then dry for a long time. “Clay soils shrink when they lose water. This year, the Novag seed slits tore open up to 1 cm wide due to the spring drought. This can lead to delayed germination or worse, as happened this year in our sugar beet, the seed germinates but slugs or other pests use the open seed slot as a food highway,” he explains.
The idea of expansion joints
The Novag is not the problem. It leaves a narrow Slot compared to no-till drills from other manufacturers. “We now want to retrofit it with Thompson wheels. These are star-shaped, V-shaped discs that we mount instead of the Press wheels. They are designed to cut into the soil 5 cm to the left and right of the seed slot to a depth of 3 cm in order to relieve the area in between. We hope to achieve an effect similar to that of an expansion joint when laying tiles,” reveals Lutz Decker.
For this year, he expects a yield loss of around 20% in the beet and is considering applying slug pellets in parallel with the next sowing as a precaution. His Novag has four seed tanks for the simultaneous application of different types of seed, fertilizer or slug pellets. However, defects and slug damage are not the only problem in his beets. As a result, there is a lack of shade and he is currently facing a full-blown late weed problem for which he does not yet have a real solution.
Nevertheless, he does not question his cultivation method and is absolutely delighted: “My soils are developing positively across the board. In the last four years, I’ve spent more time on my field than ever before. It’s very exciting to observe how the soil and plants react when you make one or two adjustments.”
Reduced use of pesticides
Then, as a farmer, you eventually get to the point where you dare to omit measures. “With cereals, I quickly realized that I could leave out the herbicide with no-till and consequently also the fungicides and growth regulators. By not disturbing the soil, we don’t stimulate existing seed potential to germinate. After sugar beet or maize, we have been able to grow cereals without synthetic chemical pesticides for the second year in a row, and largely without reducing yields. We also sow a cereal-vetch mixture on the day of the previous crop harvest,” explains Lutz Decker, admitting that vetch can reduce yields if it develops too strongly. “But as I said, we save on the use of pesticides. We want to disturb the soil as little as possible, not only mechanically but also chemically,” he argues. However, completely dispensing with pesticides is definitely not an option for him. For the future use of glyphosate, he is hoping for approval for no-till, as is already the case in France.
Next Step: Reduced fertilization
He started the switch to no-till with the idea of harvesting the same or more. He achieves this in the winter. However, spring sowing followed by a long dry phase can lead to a significant reduction in yields of up to 30 percent on his soils. “So far, however, we’ve been at least in the black every year due to savings on tillage, fuel, wages and plant protection products,” summarizes Lutz Decker.
Next, he also wants to tackle the reduction of fertilizer intensity. According to Kinsey, fertilization also has a positive effect on the health of ruminants – provided that the nutrient ratio in the soil, feed and organic fertilizer is balanced. “I strive to achieve as closed a nutrient cycle as possible on my farm. For example, I plan to produce all of our own cattle feed from grain maize and soybeans in the near future, dry both crops with the waste heat from our biogas plant and toast the soybeans. In combination with our defensive land management using the no-till method, we can achieve the necessary CO2 savings for the desired certification of our cow’s milk,” says the dairy farmer, explaining his vision.
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