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WCIL | We farm some Titus. Needs tight tile spacing and surface drainage. Slow to dry out. We rip bean stubble in the fall and it pulls the hardest and chunkiest of anything we have. Really all field operations pull harder than most soils. Come spring, its soft and mellow with slabs behind tires. If you double work anything, more slabs. Always needs to lay a while before planting. Joke is that usually only a few days each year it works good unless it's a dry spring. If it was other soil types you would park equipment for a few days, but with Titus if you pull up loose dirt and its not sticking to the tractor tires it's ready. Post spraying usually involves some ruts due to mellowness/softness most years. River level has big effect on ground conditions. Have to be there to farm it at the right time in a wetter year. Dry years are not so finicky. Raise good crops in a dry or drought year, wet year or a few big rains can be tough holding N even with sidedress, or more likely the roots are lacking oxygen. Hard for corn to come out of it. Easier to raise good beans. We've had wetter springs where we planted all beans due to potential compaction or ruts from spring N if we had applied it. We are used to farming it and do fine but it needs higher management than the "other black dirt" and won't yield like good dirt, but can be respectable. Most around here call it gumbo. The soil maps call almost all our bottoms Titus, but some of it is lighter than others and behave differently, so I don't think it's accurate. Subsoils vary from tight clay to sand, so tile and natural drying behave differently too. | |
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Titus soil
