Our team is hard at work preparing for the upcoming Dealership Minds Summit, July 29-30 in Iowa City. If you’re planning on joining us, consider sticking around for the National Strip-Tillage Conference — taking place at the same venue July 31-Aug. 1 — or at least checking out the pre-conference Strip-Till Field Day, hosted by Iowa State Extension in nearby Crawfordsville, Iowa on July 30.

During the field day, there will be at least 10 strip-till toolbars in action from different manufacturing companies, and hundreds of farmers on hand to get an up-close look at the latest strip-till equipment on the market. Our Strip-Till Conference attendees have been requesting a pre-conference field day event like this for several years, and it’s finally happening!  

This could also be a golden opportunity for you to evaluate different toolbars to potentially carry at your dealership or at least size up the ones that your local competition might be selling as the demand for strip-till equipment increases across North America. And if you're already offering strip-till equipment, learning more about the practice could lead to more sales down the road. Just ask Pete Youngblut and Zach Reiter.

"Over the 7 years we’ve been selling strip-till equipment, the interest we’re seeing has easily doubled," says Youngblut, owner of Youngblut Ag in Dysart, Iowa, a precision dealership that also carries strip-till units. "Being able to show customers how strip-till actually works has made all the difference in the world."

“I had been wanting to get into strip-till on our own farm for a long time,” says Reiter, co-owner of Z&J Farms, an equipment dealership in Cascade, Iowa, that opened in 2009. “We took on TruAG as a dealer so we could start using it ourselves in 2016. Now we’ve been having a lot of success in selling strip-till equipment, and a big reason why is that we use it ourselves. We live it and understand it, and farmers trust us.”

Iowa State Extension’s Rebecca Vittetoe has more on what to expect at the Strip-Till Field Day in the video below. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the conference or field day, email me at NNewman@LessiterMedia.com. Hope to see you there!