When Rick Jeans and his dad, Don, began experimenting with no-till in the late 1980s, they were setting in motion a management scheme that would allow Jeans to continue farming about 3,000 acres of cropland in Tonkawa, Okla., while managing a 100-cow commercial Angus herd with his wife, 1 employee and seasonal part-time help more than 30 years later

Today, Rick and Dianne’s farm is 100% no-till. They grow wheat, grain sorghum and soybeans in rotation with cover crops in the heavy loam soils of the Duck Creek watershed in far north-central Oklahoma. Jeans Farms spans 20 miles from tip to tip, but 1,000 contiguous acres is located a mile from the couple’s home just north of Tonkawa in Kay County.

“After my dad passed in 2021, I was left with the land that he was farming, which leaves us with a total of 3,600 acres including 600 acres of native pasture,” Jeans says. “Of that, Dianne and I own only 2 quarters of land and the 5 acres our house sits on. The rest is leased property, and many of those acres are with landlords who we’ve had for many years. By leasing, we’ve avoided the high cost of land ownership.”

Decade of Change

Financial stability has been a major goal for Jeans since he first began farming on his own in 1981, the same year shaky financing in Oklahoma’s Oil Patch caused a massive bust in the state’s economy at the same time that national inflation rates were…