Tom Barcellos is a conservation agriculture trailblazer on the West Coast. 

The Tipton, Calif., native was the first in his area to move away from the plow when he started no-tilling 26 years ago. Now, he estimates 60% of all corn production in his area is grown under conservation tillage practices. 

Barcellos remembers his no-till origin story like yesterday. 

“We were right in the middle of double cropping behind wheat forage and getting ready to plant corn for silage,” he recalls. “We were running 9 tractors in different fields when one of our main ones went down. There were no rentals available, and the neighbors were busy running their own. A friend in the seed business said to me, ‘There’s this no-till planter they’re talking about up north.’” 

It was a brand-new John Deere 10-row MaxEmerge no-till planter. Barcellos gave it a shot.

“We started in an irrigated field that was beginning to dry up,” he says. “We made 3 rounds, and my co-worker said, ‘Maybe it’s not going to work. This ground is too dry and tight.’ I looked at it and said, ‘Keep going.’

“We finished planting those 80 acres and started water right behind it. We had enough to germinate the seed as it grew 2-3 inches out of the ground 10 days later. We were amazed by the results.”

The 80-acre field yielded 27 tons per acre, shattering its previous high. Barcellos was immediately sold.

Strip-Till Switch

No-till was very beneficial, but Barcellos quickly found strip-till…