Mackane Vogel:

Welcome to the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators Podcast, brought to you by Source by Sound Agriculture. I'm Mackane Vogel, assistant editor of No-Till Farmer. The Influencers and Innovators series started in January 2019 and this is our 97th episode of the series. To kick off the new year, we are replaying the very first episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators Podcast about the roots of no-till and conservation tillage. Here's Lessiter Media president Mike Lessiter interviewing editor Frank Lessiter for today's no-Till history lesson.

Mike Lessiter:

I'm Mike Lessiter of Lessiter Media. Here I get the privilege and honor to interview my dad, Frank, who's with me today for this episode. And it's going to be a different episode than most of the other ones that will follow in this series. We'll go get it kicked off and get it underway. Here's a case I can say that I've known this guy my entire life.

Frank Lessiter:

Right. And you're my favorite son too.

Mike Lessiter:

Yeah, okay.

Frank Lessiter:

We have three girls plus him.

Mike Lessiter:

But no-till has been part of the family almost from the earliest days. I was three years old when you put out the first issue of No-Till Farmer. It's been part of the family, fifth child, figurative and literally been around the home since 72 and gotten to do some father son trips and memories around your job and reporting on no-till, going out on farm visits, interviews and meetings. So this is fun for me. But first, before we get into some of the questions, there's been a lot of attention on your newest project that you've come out here in recent weeks, and getting a lot of attention even Amazon reviews and from a lot of readers. Tell us a little bit about that project.

Frank Lessiter:

Well, we did a 416 page book. It's kind of the history of no-till. It goes back to the 1950s when no-till was pretty small. And when we started the magazine in 1972, there were 3.2 million acres of no-till nationwide, and today it's over a hundred million acres, so we've really done well. It's a book with about 50 chapters, talks about everything. Talks about experiences of people in North America, people around the world. This book took forever for me to do because I would remember things I'd done 20 years or so ago. And I've kind of said in the company, if anybody ever takes as long on a project as I've taken on this one, they're likely going to get fired.

Mike Lessiter:

Right. Well, it was worth the wait, I'll say that. We're here today because the book that, as it came out, got a lot of interest from I think people who were surprised to hear about the story of no-till, things that they didn't realize that made lasting contributions to all of agriculture both here and internationally. And as a result there was support to do a podcast to keep the story going. And we got six months of the year already committed to before we've recorded a single session. So all you listeners out here, thanks for the support and we're kicking off a podcast on No-Till Influencers that is going to hit your desks, your phones every couple weeks. So tell us, Frank, about the very first time that you heard the term no-till.

Frank Lessiter:

Well, it's kind of hard to remember, but I was editing a livestock magazine in Chicago. I'd known a little about no-till, but I can't remember ever being on a farm before that. And I was looking to change jobs and I had two or three different options and decided to come back to Milwaukee at Ryman Publications. And I've been the editor of No-Till since the very first issue in November of 1972. We came back up here about August 1, 1972, and most people move up in life getting new jobs. I've been the editor of No-Till Farmers since 1972, so I guess I'm in the same rut I've always been in. Kind of like what farmers are. Farmers tend to farm and stay at the same job all the same years.

But I remember once, just before I took this job, I went home to Michigan to the Centennial Farm where I'd grown up and was telling my dad that I was taking this job, and he pretty much thought I was nuts. So we had three young kids and we're moving back here and he didn't know what no-till was, thought I was taking a big chance on it. And I left him a couple-

Mike Lessiter:

He tried to talk you out of it?

Frank Lessiter:

No, not really, but he just thought I was nuts. He probably knew I was stubborn and already made up my mind. But I'd left him a couple brochures because Chevron was marketing paraquat at the time, which was the big chemical as it turned out in no-till, and he didn't say anything. And then I came back a week or two later and he asked me where he could buy some paraquat because he wanted to try some weed control. And then later on as he retired, we rented land out to some other people, probably 200 acres, or 150 acres, and the farm got no-tilled for a few years. A guy renting the land was doing it. So we've done very well. It's interesting, there are ag editors around that have written about farming as long as I have, but I don't know of anybody who's stayed in a specific area all these years. So it's just been fascinating to watch this grow. And I've been very proud of what we've done and I've been very proud of what American farmers have done in cutting costs, cutting erosion, cutting fuel, cutting labor, everything.

Mike Lessiter:

So you slowed grandpa down long enough for him to hear what you were going to be doing and shortly thereafter he wanted to know how to get some on his farm.

Frank Lessiter:

Right. We got him turned on a little bit to it.

Mike Lessiter:

What was that job interview like when you were brought up to Milwaukee to talk about this concept, which I imagine was somewhat foreign, but what did they tell you about this and what the opportunity might be?

Frank Lessiter:

They were going to start a magazine, and what it was about, right from the start, it was in central Kentucky where it got started. Harry Young at Herndon, Kentucky had pioneered it on seven tenths of an acre in the mid '60s and had grown from there. And one of the people on the Ryman staff, Galen Morgan, had been pretty close to no-till. He had done some collateral work for Allis-Chalmers, Chevron and Dow, and so he was pretty knowledgeable about it, but he was doing other things in there.

And we came up with the idea right away that we would charter a plane and five of us would fly down and spend two or three days in Kentucky and Southern Illinois. We were at the Dixon Springs Agricultural Center, which the University of Illinois had then, and a researcher called George McKibben had actually started it there and Harry Young got the idea from him. But you go down to George McKibben's field days in August, I mean he's trying 300 different combinations of herbicides. I mean he had things where they were using five pounds of atrazine per acre and it was amazing. That was some of the most practical research that was ever done on no-till and it was in the early days.

Mike Lessiter:

Days. So they laid out a bullish picture for no-till and you could see it. You agreed that it was worth leaving a stable job and career to-

Frank Lessiter:

I was looking for something different to do. I was getting kind of bored with what I was doing and needed some new challenges. And it's kind of interesting how we built a circulation on this because they went out to farm equipment dealers who we work with closely today and asked them for names of people who they thought might be interested in no-tillage. And the idea was to get maybe 30,000 names and do a magazine with 30,000 on it. But when they got all done with this, after a month and a half, two months, they had 60,000 names. So the first few issues of No-Till, we mailed to 60,000 people, but the problem was the ad support was not there. No-Till Farmer in those days was free, but the ad support wasn't there. And we went maybe a year, year and a half, probably a year and a half in which it wasn't working. We were losing money. And we converted it to a newsletter which still goes on today. Today we do eight newsletters a year and four magazines, so we're doing one every month.

Mike Lessiter:

So take us back to the late sixties and early 1970s and what was going on in ag at the time that was kind of setting the table for no-till to find its place, to find its groove, and start to be embraced out there?

Frank Lessiter:

Well, conservation was important. We were losing lots of soil through wind erosion and soil erosion. And one of the things that really got started with no-till in Kentucky was opportunity to double crop, because Harry Young would plant wheat in September, take that wheat off in June, or wheat or barley, take it off in June, and then immediately, the same day no-till double crop soybeans. And then the following year he would do no-till corn. So he was getting three crops in two years and that made really good economic sense to him, and it just kind of took off from there. And then farming wasn't doing great in those days. People were looking for ways to trim costs, and early on, yields were equal or they could be below what you did with conventional, but it caught up pretty soon to where the yields were pretty good. And actually no-till really caught on among farmers who were innovators, who were willing to try new things.

And it always amazed me in the '90s, I guess, to find out how many people were buying Caterpillar tractors with tracks instead of wheels on them. And it finally dawned on me one day, the reason is these no-tillers are innovators, they want to try new ideas, and that's what the Cat tractors with tracks were.

Mike Lessiter:

You grew up on a farm, dairy farm for the most part, right? Did a little bit of everything, but it was mostly dairy. So you're working as editor of a livestock publication in Chicago at this time. So you came up, had to not only get yourself prepared to talk about row crop agriculture, but you had to get yourself up to speed on what no-till was. And it was a time where you were kind of living on the leading edge. It was a tremendous resource for you to learn at the same time that you're sharing with your readers. How did you go about bringing yourself up to speed on no-till?

Frank Lessiter:

Well, I immediately got myself out of the office and got on some farms and went to some field days and went to university conferences. There was a fair amount of interest in no-till in those days and one of the big things was making better use of whatever available moisture, whatever rain was falling on the ground, and just worked at it and got out of the office and visited with farmers. I like to tell people that we do not have the recipe for making no-till work, but we'll give you the ingredients, then you can write your own recipe. And you could have two farmers who live across the street from one another, both very successful with no-till, and if you traded systems, they might be able to make it work and they might not. So I'd like to tell this story about we'll give you the ingredients, write your own recipe.

Mike Lessiter:

That's probably even more challenging of a role as an ag journalist where there is no set formula out there because you have to convey that by itself.

Frank Lessiter:

Early on, Ryman Publications had a magazine called Farm Wife News and they would take as many as 1000 or 1200 people to Hawaii for a week, and we made no-till part of those stories. And I remember one year in Hawaii we probably had 300 people who were no-tilling at the time out of a bigger audience, and we did a survey and we asked them what their no-till system was. And I think we came back, when we gathered them all up and put them together, I think there were 70 different systems. Somebody was doing something different than somebody else. Out of these 400 people, there were like 70 different systems. So there was no one way to make it work and it's an attitude as much as it was. And then the equipment was scarce. Like the book that I've done, there's a number of pages in there about planters and drills being built in farm shops at that time because nobody was happy with what the manufacturers were making.

And if you look at that, the real breakthroughs in seeding equipment was done by the Short Line companies, Great Planes, Howard Martin at Martin Industries with row cleaners and coulters. And Ingersol came up with fluted coulters and rippled coulters that made no-till work. John Tye was another one.

Mike Lessiter:

Tell us, even the people who have been following us for a long time may not realize how and why No-Till Farmer publication was birthed here in downtown Milwaukee. Tell us about what that environment was like, the offices, how many people were there, what that place was like, and what it was like during that launch period?

Frank Lessiter:

Well, there were probably 30 people or so when we first started No-Till Farmer. And Ryman had Farm Wife News, which had a tremendous circulation. They had a magazine called Farm Building News that went to people that built barns. And then No-Till... And the guy who... And they did some collateral work and PR work for some companies including Ciba-Geigy and Allis-Chalmers. And the guy who really was the no-till guy was a guy named Galen Morgan who became a good friend of mine and was a mentor. He had been on Harry Young's farm where it all started probably eight or 10 times by the time I came there in 1972, but he really understood this farm, or this concept. I listened to him really careful and learned a lot from him.

Mike Lessiter:

Even farmers that we talk with today at the conferences, they're intrigued about how you put a magazine together. And then we ask about the marketing and the advertising and the editorial direction, the coming up with story ideas. How did you do that back in those early days and how did you find farmers that were not only experimenting or having success with no-till but to get anyone to talk about it?

Frank Lessiter:

Well, most no-tillers were willing to talk about it. They thought it was a great system. We would get leads from university guys and suppliers and county extension agents. And getting leads, even then, wasn't that tough. But I always remember a comment Darrell Smith who was a retired field editor for Farm Journal made to me maybe 10 or 15 years ago, and he says, "I don't understand these no-tillers. They got such a good thing going. Why do they think everybody in that world needs to be doing it? And they're pushing it all the time. They're telling other farmers, you should do this, you should do this." But he says, "They meet with problems, other people don't want to do it." He said, "Sometimes you wonder why they just don't keep it to themselves."

Mike Lessiter:

Well, it's kind of spreading the gospel.

Frank Lessiter:

Yeah, exactly. [inaudible 00:14:50] That's exactly what it was, it's the gospel of farming.

Mackane Vogel:

We'll come back to this very first episode in a moment, but first I'd like to thank our sponsor, Source by Sound Agriculture for supporting today's podcast. Source from Sound Agriculture unlocks more of the nitrogen and phosphorus in your fields so you can rely less on expensive fertilizer. The foliar application has a low use rate and you can mix it right into your tank. Check out Source. It's like caffeine for microbes. Learn more at sound.ag. Before we get back to today's discussion, here's a little known no-till fact from Frank.

Frank Lessiter:

So today one of the popular ideas with no-till is planting green. And I'm going to go way back to the national No-Tillage conference in 2006. We're going to talk about Frank Martin from Missouri no-tilling corn into a living cover crop. Frank shared his ideas at the conference on getting into his fields extra early by looking at the possibility of no-tilling corn into a living cover crop. He's from Hallsville, Missouri and he intends to burn down the cover crop two to four weeks after planting. Admitting that the plan is untried and ambitious, Frank says his list of potential advantages for making better use of available moisture and extending the growing season outweigh his list of potential disadvantages. So even as far back as 2006, we were planting green.

Mackane Vogel:

And now let's get back to Frank and Mike's conversation.

Mike Lessiter:

So you were the editor, you had to come up with the content for it, there was advertising at the time, there was marketing and circulation development. How did you do those things?

Frank Lessiter:

Well, I was pretty much editor on the editor's side and the other people in the company had to do the other things. I wasn't publisher of magazine until we bought it 10 years later. But there were like five of us that went down on the private plane to Kentucky to really look at it at that time, and that was a real eye opener for us. This is our first issue, it was November 1972, 32 pages, little thin on advertising, but-

Mike Lessiter:

Who did advertise in that issue? Who was there at the time?

Frank Lessiter:

Ortho, which was Chevron, they were doing paraquat at that time. Trojan Seed, a lot of old timers. Remember when Trojan Seed was a big player in the corn market? Buffalo advertised their ridge till systems. Allis-Chalmers was in with two page spread.

Mike Lessiter:

Yeah. With one L on no-till.

Frank Lessiter:

Yep.

Mike Lessiter:

I wanted to talk about that. If I have seen that before, it's been many, many years. Let's open up that issue, take a look at it, and tell us what you remember as you're flipping through this, and what stories were in the first issue?

Frank Lessiter:

We're at Simpson, Illinois, George McKibben and I talked a little bit about all the herbicide studies he did, and we did a diary of our no-till tour to Kentucky, which we visited farmers over a couple days. We talked about watch it until you know the no-till language because no-till even today is zero till, minimum till, conservation till, strip till, vertical till, slot planting, sod planting, mulch planting, all kinds-

Mike Lessiter:

Were those terms that were used back in '72?

Frank Lessiter:

Yeah. Vertical tillage wasn't, but most of the rest of them were. We talked about, these were the days when surface fertilization were getting the job done. This is a story we did of Glover Triplett at Ohio who's now retired in Mississippi, but he spent his whole career basically doing no-till research. And they tell the story about when he was at Wooster with Ohio State and he took his wife out to see these plots he had put out and they were totally weedy. And she said to him, "Glover, you're going to lose your job." But he's hung in there, and this was 50 years later or so and he's still doing it.

Mike Lessiter:

He was one of your living legends in no-till. He came to the conference a couple years ago.

Frank Lessiter:

Yep. And he's still active back at Mississippi where he grew up and still doing research. And there's a couple stories in here... Jim Smith was the farm manager at the John Umstead Hospital at Butner North Carolina and he managed 11,000 acres, and this was a mental hospital. And he used to tell the story about he was out planting one day in sod and it was really ugly. And the guy came along and said, "What are you doing?" And he said, "I'm planting the sod." And he said the guy didn't say anything to me, but he went up to hospital, he asked for the general manager, and he went and talked to him. He says, "You got a crazy guy down in the field, must be one of your patients. You better get him out of that field." And so the general manager told Jim this story, but three, four months later when the corn came up and looked good, the same farmer went back to that general manager and said, "I think you ought to let him out."

Mike Lessiter:

Right. That's funny.

Frank Lessiter:

And then Darryl Smith worked with us at that time, who went on to Farm Journal, and there's a story on him in here that he wrote about with a farmer in Northwest Illinois who was double cropping corn after taking off a crop of alfalfa in early May. And so double cropping even more so than wheat or barley and soybeans, there's always been other crops involved. And this farmer in Illinois was already saying, "I'm saving 19 tons of soil per acre with no-till because it's not running off."

Mike Lessiter:

Do you remember some of those visits and putting together that first issue?

Frank Lessiter:

Oh yeah, I do. And this is one of the problems I had with doing the no-till history book because I remember being on all these farms and I had trouble getting my, been on so many farms, I couldn't get my arms around everything I wanted to talk about.

Mike Lessiter:

So this premier issue was November of '72.

Frank Lessiter:

Then we bought the magazine or newsletter in 1981, 1982, and my wife, Pam, and I, we went out on our own with it and we've had it ever since.

Mike Lessiter:

Well, I bet there'd be a lot of people who would like to see this first one. There's a lot of information in this. Did you say 32 pages?

Frank Lessiter:

Yeah.

Mike Lessiter:

Tell us about Plowboy Pete and No-Till Ned.

Frank Lessiter:

Well, this is interesting. We started with a cartoon series, which we did for two or three years, and I think there's six or eight of these in the history book I did. So we had No-Till Ned who did everything right and Plowboy Pete who did everything wrong. And we would ask our readers to write the caption lines for it. And here we got a picture of a combine being stuck in a hole, which would be the conventional tillage that says, Pete needs his 150 horsepower tractor for two reasons, to pull his eight bottom mobile plow and pull his combine out of the mud.

Interesting story here because if you had the winning caption, we would buy dinner for four at a place of your choice. In 1972, we'd get a bill from the guy and it might be 40 or $45 for four people eating out. And later on we were doing this and it kind of led to us quitting the contest. A guy from Virginia took his wife and two of his friends out and sent us a bill for $400. This was in 1972. And that was about the time we were running out of ideas and we discontinued it.

Mike Lessiter:

Yeah, that's pretty good pay for writing a caption on a [inaudible 00:22:23].

Frank Lessiter:

Exactly. Right.

Mike Lessiter:

Yeah. How long did it take you to put that premiere issue together?

Frank Lessiter:

Well, I started there on August 1, and we turned this out probably by October 10, October 15. It was different in those days. They were paste-up key lines and using Exacto knives and glue to lay everything out, and it's not like today with computers and everything. So it took a while.

Mike Lessiter:

So take a... Think of a subscriber that we have here in 2019 who's never seen this issue and tell them how it's the same and how it's different than the product that they'll get in their mailboxes in 2019.

Frank Lessiter:

Well, I want to back up for a second because you made me think of something. And there's a fellow who has been to all 26 of our National No-Tillage Conferences named Allan Brooks from Markesan, Wisconsin. And it's not in here, but I think this story is in the second issue. We did a story on his dad and Allen's picture is in this story. And in fact, that would be a good one to take to the No-Till Conference because everybody would see it, and Allan's still there and he'd love it, but...

Mike Lessiter:

He's proud of that. I've heard him talk a number of times about how he was in that early issue.

Frank Lessiter:

We've just got more in depth. I mean, you look back at some of these stories and they were kind of shallow. We said the guy used fertilizer, but we didn't tell exactly where he put it or what day he put it on, or whether he mixed it with herbicides, or liquid, dry, and whether he was broadcasting it or banding it or injecting it. And so we've gotten really-

Mike Lessiter:

Well you were learning as you went too [inaudible 00:24:05].

Frank Lessiter:

Exactly. Right. And our editorial philosophy has always been, we want quality editorial. I like to say we'll give you the meat and potatoes, we're not going to put in the salad or the appetizer or dessert. We're just going to stick to the facts. And when we go out and do a story, all of our editors... I mean you go and do a story on a guy and you may have 10 different ideas; here's what he fertilizes, here's what his seeding rates are, here's what he harvests, here's when he does this. And that's not the kind of story we want to write, we want to run with seven different points. Maybe we want to run the whole story on where he side-dresses nitrogen and really get into the details, in the general story, do you side-dress nitrogen? Yeah, there's 20 words on it. Well, when we do this in a whole story, it may be a thousand words that we get in there and talk about exactly where he puts it, when he place is it.

And if you got two great ideas off of a farmer, maybe it's two different stories. You maybe hold onto one of the stories for six months and do it later. But you just got to get the in depth because farmers are ahead of everything today. And I think another part of our success is we've never thought we were smarter than any of our readers. And I've done stories on farms in all 50 states over the years, and I've never been on a farm that I didn't learn something. I've been on a few farms I didn't learn a lot and I've been on a few farms where I saw they were doing things wrong and I learned from that. But if you keep your eyes open and listen, you can learn something from every visit you make.

Mike Lessiter:

Tell us about how you had realized that in your first issue wasn't your best work. And I know from having been around you forever that you have said, "I want every issue to be better than the one before it."

Frank Lessiter:

Right. I never want a perfect issue. We can come close, but I want to see something in every issue we do we could improve.

Mike Lessiter:

So tell us how your subscribers, who is loyal of a group as I've ever seen in any industry, helped convey to you what they needed and how you and your team matched that with each step moving forward.

Frank Lessiter:

Well, these people are hard to give them information they haven't gotten someplace else because they're so far ahead of the curve on being innovators, and you just got to listen to them. And somebody tries an idea, makes a good story, somebody tries an I idea that bombs, maybe there's still a story there. And I remember back taking a phone call from a guy out in Northern Illinois about 15 years ago, and we had done a story on why you ought to no-till. And he called me up and says, "Frank, what is wrong with you?" I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "You just did this story on why you ought a no-till. Don't you realize that all your subscribers are already no-tilling? They don't have to be sold on this. Take that space and do something on fertilizer or something and quit telling us that we need to no-till." And that was a day that I woke up to the fact that he was right. And I don't think we've done a story on why you ought to no-till since then. Now on our website, we got an area called No-Till 101, and we got some stories in there about why ought to no-till. I woke up to what readers wanted from us.

Mike Lessiter:

Yeah, well there's two observations with that. One, you have a loyal subscriber base that will call and tell you how they expect you to improve and, second, and probably just every bit as important if not more so, is you listen to them.

Frank Lessiter:

Right. And I remember along about maybe the fifth or sixth National No-Tillage Conferences that we run, we had classroom sessions. I ran one on the basics of no-till. And the idea was we get people that come to our conference who aren't no-tilling and they're thinking about it and everything. So we get people that haven't no-tilled. I went into the classroom and there were maybe 25 people in there and none of them were first timers. There were guys I knew that'd been no-tilling for 25, 30 years. And I said, "What are you guys doing in here?" It doesn't hurt to go back to the basics, but the guys who were not no-tilling found a session that they thought would be more important to them than that one we ran on the no-till basics. So you learn from that too.

And we do round table sessions. I mean, we get up to where we do 80 of them at a time. And once in a while you get a session, well not... Years ago we would do sessions on the John Deere 750 no-till drill and sometimes there'd be 150 people in that room. And another time we might have a session on no-till cotton at the same time, and we don't draw a lot of people from the south that are in this, but there were three guys in that room talking about no-till cotton just among themselves. And they thought this was the greatest session they've ever been to because there was nobody back home that was no-tilling cotton like they were.

And once in a great while you can have a session that draws nobody, and people say, "Well, does that really upset you?" And I say, "No, because they picked something else that was more important to them." Now we may never run that session again, but I've seen the time 10 years ago or so we would run a session on no-till vegetables and maybe 29 people went to it. Today we can run a session on no-till vegetables and 150 will go to it.

Mike Lessiter:

Next question. So we know this because we're around it all the time, you can have a brilliant editorial product that the world never sees because you can't get it out to market or a market doesn't exist for it. So want to take us back to when you were getting going, how you went about getting this vision of No-Till Farmer, a peer group on no-till in a publication format is essentially what it is, right?

Frank Lessiter:

Right.

Mike Lessiter:

How you got that out to the market, how you conveyed that to all the farmers out there who needed it or didn't realize they needed it yet?

Frank Lessiter:

Well, it goes back to these guys being innovators, they're more than willing to look at new ideas. And it just happened. I mean, people would tell somebody else, "Hey, there's this No-till Farmer. You ought to look at it." And I remember talking to a guy who came to our National No-Tillage Conference in the early days one day and he said, "I never knew this publication existed until," he said, "just three weeks ago." So it would've been the middle of December. He said, "My wife and I are laying on..." He's from Indiana, I think, if I remember right. He said, "My wife and I are laying on the beach at Fort Myers, Florida and there's a guy reading a magazine next to me in a chair called No-Till Farmer and I asked him about it." He said, "I've been no-tilling for two or three years. I don't even know anything about this. The guy shared it with me." And he said, "I'm calling you up. I'm coming to the National No-Tillage Conference."

So I mean there was an interest for it. We sometimes do more... Today, in one of our magazines, will do more on no-tillage in one issue than some farm publications are doing in a year's time. I think anybody that's no-tilling can find something of interest in every issue of our No-Till Farmer. And-

Mike Lessiter:

You have to when you're charging them money to get the information, you have to deliver.

Frank Lessiter:

Exactly. And another thing is, I mean, soil health today and cover crops has gotten a lot of interest, and I think we did a cover crop story with no-till in our first or second issue. This gets on my bandwagon because we're talking today about soil health and cover crops and sustainability and our no-tillers been doing this since 1972 or even earlier. We've been reporting on it since 1972. It's not new to us.

Mike Lessiter:

All right. Well, thank you, Frank. I appreciate the chance to sit in here and talk to you and actually to take a look at that premier issue from November 1972. It's been a long time. And proud of what you've done and look forward to releasing this podcast out and all the episodes that will follow. Thanks for joining us today.

Frank Lessiter:

Shows I'm getting old.

Mackane Vogel:

That's it for this episode of the No-Till Farmer Influencers and Innovators Podcast. Thanks again to our sponsor Source by Sound Agriculture for helping to make this series possible. Before we go, here's Frank once again with another little known no-till fact.

Frank Lessiter:

In another look back, we're going to look back to the year 2018. And among growers who participated in No-Till Farmers 2018 No-Till Operational Benchmark Study, 97% were no-tilling, but they were also using some other tillage practices. For instance, 17% of these growers were using strip-till, 19% were using vertical-tillage, and 24% were using a form of minimum tillage at at least a minimum amount of their acres, and there were still 1% who were moldboard plowing at least a few acres in their operation.

Mackane Vogel:

You can find more podcasts about no-till topics and strategies at No-TillFarmer.com/podcasts. A transcript of this episode will be available there shortly. For our entire staff here at No-Till Farmer, I'm Mackane Vogel. Thanks for listening. Keep on no-tilling and have a great day.