Leaving residue on your fields has many benefits—improved soil moisture, water permeation, aeration, and soil tilth; fewer passes required; savings in terms of time, money, labor, fuel,and equipment; and ultimately, higher yields. In order to ensure proper seed placement and avoid hairpinning, however, you have to move that residue before planting through effective residue management procedures.

Residue management is an excellent weapon against one of the greatest threats to crops—erosion caused by water. It is recognized as a cost-effective means of significantly reducing erosion and maintaining productivity, if it is properly executed. Successful residue management depends on proper depth control, which is essential in order to ensure that undesirable soil disruption does not occur. If you’re engaging the soil with the residue manager, you’re moving the soil as well as any herbicides that have been applied. Soil moved out of the row is clearly counterproductive. The incorrectly set residue manager’s fingers will also create a trench in the seedbed, which allows erratic seed placement and heavy rain to drain and carry away everything—seeds, soil, fertilizer, and herbicides.

Obtaining the desired percentage of residue removal is entirely possible without disturbing the soil if the right residue management tool is chosen. Yetter Manufacturing Company offers a wide variety of residue managers with many different attachments from which to choose, including the popular Shark Tooth® model.

It is also crucial to use the proper residue management techniques in order to achieve success. It’s not necessary to move 100% of the residue, and attempts to do so will likely result in disruption of the underlying soil. A properly set residue manager will move the residue without moving the soil, and your planter gauge wheels will run on level ground for optimum seed placement. Residue manager wheels operated in a mostly vertical position relative to the soil surface provide the best opportunity to achieve desirable residue removal with the least chance of soil engagement. The Yetter Shark Tooth® model keeps topsoil and herbicide intact leaving the seedbed uniform and energized for maximum yields, and it effectively moves the residue without affecting adjacent rows.

Shark Tooth® wheels for
tough residue conditions.

“The Shark Tooth® Wheels did an excellent job in corn-on-corn acres of clearing the cornstalks without throwing them into the next row on my 20” planter,” says Kevin Malecek of Danube, Minnesota.

When clearing residue it is important to adjust the planter frame height and drawbar so that the planter unit closely follows the ground’s contours. Set the downpressure spring so that the residue manager doesn’t go too deep. If the residue manager’s wheels stop turning from time to time, it means that they are set at the correct depth and you are not moving the soil. In finely tilled or soft soils in which the planter may lose floatation, make any additional adjustments needed to keep the residue manager on top of the soil. Ground speed affects residue flow, so keep the planter moving fast enough to let the residue manager do its job.

For severing certain types of residue, a sharp cutting edge may be required. Concave discs, especially those with a sharp cutting edge engaging the soil ahead of the planter unit gauge wheels, will plow out soil regardless of whether the blade edge is solid, notched, or any other configuration. The most extreme conditions require wheels that sever the thickest residue while minimizing build-up. The Yetter Shark Tooth® Residue Manager Wheels have Clean Release Teeth™ that eliminate such build-up and are guaranteed not to plug. Victor Miller of Oelwein, Iowa, uses the Yetter Shark Tooth® Wheels with his 24-row, 20” planter. Victor says that he, “. . . was able to plant into conditions that [he] never before thought possible.”