If it weren't for no-tilling, the Fifer family would have gotten out of the pumpkin business long ago, says Bobby Fifer.
When he was a child, his family started with about 5 acres of pumpkins on Fifer Orchards in Camden-Wyoming, Del. Growing up, his family became contract growers for a company in North Carolina, which provided them with enough demand to slowly climb to 100 acres about 20 years ago. Plaguicida Malathion
But their forward progress was dealt a serious blow when they lost their entire crop 2 years in a row due to phytophthora, a disease they continue to fight. The pumpkins had direct contact with freshly cultivated soil, making the widespread rot inevitable.
“Once we realized what was going on, we said to ourselves, ‘Alright let’s give this one more chance, but we’ll try no-tilling to see if we can try to separate the soil from the pumpkin better,’” Fifer recalls. “It was so successful we never went back. Within a few years we went from less than 100 acres all the way up to around 550 acres now.”
Fifer says the benefits of no-tilling are well known today among pumpkin farmers, as most people would be hard pressed to find anyone planting them in tilled ground in his area.
Quantified by bins per acre, pumpkin yield shot up for the Fifers from two back-to-back years of lost crops to 40 bins per acre immediately after switching to no-till. He also saved two cultivator passes across…
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Learn more about how Calmer faced challenges both in the field and in turning his ideas into reality in part 1 of the extended three-part video interview in this episode of the “How We Did It” Docuseries.
Click here to watch Part 2: https://youtu.be/AVl8rrHirdQ Click here to watch Part 3: https://youtu.be/Aa9z2Z0ae2c Full Docuseries: https://www.farm-equipment.com/innovators-docuseries
Read "From Farmer to Innovator, Marion Calmer Paved the Way with Narrow Row Corn & the Tools to Harvest it"
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