No-Till Living Legend Ray McCormick will do just about anything for conservation. Whether it’s turning farmland into wetlands or buying an electric Ford Lightning F-150 pickup truck, McCormick makes decisions based on what’s best for the environment.

“For me, it's about saving the planet,” the Vincennes, Ind., no-tiller says. “You can't put a price on that. That's why I paid all the money I did for this pickup. It was the only one out there. The guy's mouth fell open when I said, ‘OK, I'll take it.' He's like, ‘That's more money than I spent on my home.’”

McCormick is No-Till Farmer’s 2024 Conservation Ag Operator Fellow (see sidebar p. 36), chosen for the honor due to his extensive experience with no-till and innovative approach to conservation practices. He no-tills 2,700 acres in the Vincennes area and manages about 3,000 acres of woods and wetlands. Named a No-Till Living Legend in 2011, McCormick has since continued to build on his diverse array of conservation practices and environmental advocacy.

“If you look at my farm, the most important thing, and the thing that is of the most wealth by far, is the value of the land,” McCormick says. “The land will take care of you if you take care of it. I do everything I can at all costs to take care of that resource.”    

Restoring Wetlands

The land that McCormick doesn’t farm is just as important to him as the land that he does. Early on in his farming career, McCormick started buying the worst farmland in his area and restoring it to permanent wetlands. 

“I would search through auctions and then see what the soil types were,” McCormick says. “If it was wet and had the right soils, then I'd go try to buy it. A lot of times, those fields were going pretty cheap.”

Under the USDA’s Wetland Reserve Program (WRP), the wetlands are eligible for a one-time payment based on the value of the land and protected into perpetuity.

3rd Annual Conservation Ag Operator Fellowship

No-Till Farmer's annual Conservation Ag Operator Fellowship program follows a selected no-till farmer throughout the year and shares the real-time decision-making and solutions needed to make no-till and conservation ag practices work in real-world conditions.

The 2024 fellowship program, made possible by The Nature Conservancy, features Ray McCormick, a No-Till Living Legend and 2010 No-Till Innovator Award recipient. No-Till Farmer's editors and industry advisors selected McCormick due to his extensive experience with no-till and innovative approach to implementing a diverse spectrum of conservation practices. Follow McCormick throughout the year with feature stories in each Conservation Tillage Guide, an online multimedia series and question forum, and a capstone presentation at the 33rd Annual National No-Tillage Conference in Louisville, Ky., from Jan. 7-10, 2025. Click here to learn more.

“I've spent all of my life trying to accumulate land, and I've been pretty successful at it, but I've done it in unusual ways that most farmers didn't understand or wouldn't do,” McCormick says. “I was able to use the conservation angle to enter in programs and get government payments when other people weren't.”

In the years that followed, McCormick became involved with state and federal groups working to restore wetlands. He says he’s working as fast as he can to convert farmland into wetlands in his home state of Indiana. 

“I was on a conference call the other day with a wetlands group, and they always ask for your name and the organization you're with,” McCormick says. “When it got to me, I said, ‘Well, I'm Ray McCormick, a farmer, and all I'm doing is trying to put wetlands back faster than the state can destroy them, and I think I'm winning.’”

Often he’s the rare farmer voice speaking out in favor of wetland projects, and he has been for decades. Pres. George H.W. Bush promised no net loss of wetlands on the campaign trail in 1988, and once president, the Bush administration put McCormick on the list to testify pro-wetlands at a hearing in Peoria, Ill. After some back and forth about whether he’d be able to speak and a detour for a Crosby, Stills & Nash concert happening the evening before, McCormick showed up to a room packed with the Farm Bureau members, all of whom were against protecting wetlands.

Right before McCormick’s turn to speak, Dean Kleckner, the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, testified that he had scientific evidence that disproved all of the benefits of wetlands. Kleckner received a standing ovation when he finished talking.

Check The Specs...

Name: Ray McCormick

Location: Vincennes, Ind.

Acres: 2,700 farmland, 3,000 woodlands and wetlands

Years No-Tilling: 37

Crops: Corn and soybeans

Primary Soil Type: Alford silt loam on hills, Armiesburg in river bottoms

Precipitation: 42 inches

Irrigation: Yes, 250 acres

Livestock: 40 cows

“I was furious,” McCormick says. “I got up there and said to him, ‘I don’t know where you were raised, but I was raised on a farm where we have wetlands, and everything you said wasn't true is true.’ I went through the list of benefits, and boy, I really laid it on him. When I stopped, the rest of the crowd gave me a standing ovation.”

After that passionate speech, McCormick became a go-to spokesman for government officials and lobbyists looking to forward on-farm and environmental conservation initiatives. One such project was the Goose Pond Fish & Wildlife Area, an approximately 8,000-acre wetland about 30 miles from McCormick’s farm. The Indiana Department of Natural Resources attempted to turn the land into a wildlife area in the early 1990s, but politics sidelined the project. McCormick was determined to bring the project to fruition, and in 1999, he helped convince the property owner to enroll the Goose Pond into the USDA’s Wetlands Reserve Program. 

“I've been putting wetlands back as fast as I can,” McCormick says. “Too much of our society is led by greed, whether it's cutting timber, mining, coal, tilling the ground. This planet can't take that. We did it with the buffalo, and we're doing it with the wetlands. The wetlands of Indiana are just like the buffalo. Some people are not going to be happy until every wetland is gone.”

Responsible & Profitable Farming

In 2024, McCormick anticipates planting 1,000 acres of non-GMO soybeans and 1,500-1,700 acres of non-GMO corn. All of the crops are no-till and going into non-GMO markets for human consumption, adding an estimated $0.50-$0.60 per bushel premium on corn and $3.10 premium on each bushel of soybeans.

“I sell into specialty markets, which are all making drinking alcohol out of the non-GMO corn,” McCormick says. “I don't know why people need non-GMO to poison their liver, but it's not for me to judge. I don't believe in non-GMO health benefits, but I'm not the consumer. I believe in satisfying the consumer. If they want non-GMO, I'm going to help supply the non-GMO if they're going to pay more money for it.”

Even with premiums, tanking corn prices are going to make it “impossible” to make a profit in 2024, according to McCormick. He’ll participate in a 1031 exchange to sell 1,700 acres of wetlands and woods, and then purchase farmland.

McCormick uses Agri Drain water control structures to flood his fields for migratory bird habitat. The structure is a plastic box that uses removable boards to either hold or drain water from the field. Photo by: Michaela Paukner

Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) payments also factor into McCormick’s bottom line. McCormick is doing his second round of CSP, so he had to add additional conservation practices to his acres in order to qualify. He opted to leave unharvested grain for wildlife, make shallow water areas in the fields for migratory birds, monitor irrigation and make nutrient management plans.

“They didn't want to let me in CSP again the second time,” McCormick says. “It's a massive amount of paperwork. Each one of my landlords has to sign a paper saying they understand that they don't get any of the conservation money from the CSP. A lot of people just aren't willing to go through all that to get conservation payments. I am, but a lot aren't.”

The shallow water areas require McCormick to flood the field using Agri Drain water control structures, plastic boxes with removable boards that can either hold or drain water from the field. The flooded fields provide habitat for migratory birds, a benefit for McCormick’s duck hunting business.

While this flooding is intentional, overflowing rivers can be devastating to McCormick’s flood-prone property during the growing season.

“My dad lost 3 out of 4 crops in the late ’50s and early ’60s,” McCormick says. “It put him in the insurance business because he said his children were going to starve if he didn’t do something. We went a long time without much flooding, but in the ’80s or so, it really started picking up, and it got to where 3 years ago, I’d lost 11 crops in a row.”

McCormick replants what’s lost to flooding, which is usually about 50% of the flood-prone land, even when it seems too late in the season. One year in late July, the river flooded as his corn was making ears, and the crop insurance people told McCormick to knock it down. He no-tilled soybeans Aug. 6-10 to attempt to make up for the loss and ended up with a 32 bushel-per-acre soybean crop.

“That's climate change,” McCormick says. “My dad used to say if you're going to plant soybeans after July 10, you're just kidding yourself. Now we've got good varieties and a modern no-till drill that allows us to get back in there and plant a crop that won’t be frosted until late November. There’s a long window of growing season from August on with climate change.”

Saving World’s Best Soils

McCormick maximizes the pass with the combine by seeding cover crops at the same time that he’s harvesting his cash crop. A Gandy Orbit-Air air seeder and Gandy 1018 air seeder are mounted on each end of the draper header, which balances the weight and doubles the acreage possible before refilling. The seed is sprayed off the back of the draper and under the throat of the combine.

“We want every foot of that swath covered up with bean stubble,” McCormick says. “Wherever the cover crop seed is touching the ground, it's going to come up, but throw a mulch on top of it, it's all going to come up every time.”

For corn, a Valmar 4056 air seeder is mounted on the left side of the corn head and air hoses deliver the cover crop seed in front of the snapping rollers. 

“Marion Calmer said you want all your residue going through the corn head, not the combine,” McCormick says. “Living by that, your cover crop needs to go on in front of your snapping rollers so as they pull all the residue through, your cover crop is covered with a mulch.”

The Valmar is much larger and hydraulically driven, allowing for variable rate, row monitoring and weight monitoring. McCormick says he typically fills the seeder only halfway to reduce the weight carried on the corn head and because refilling from the tender only takes about 2 minutes.

The benefits of cover crops in flooded conditions became evident one year when McCormick forgot to turn on the switch for the air seeder. About ¼ of a mile didn’t have any cover crop, but the rest of the field did. The following spring, McCormick says flooding took about 8 inches of soil off the area without the cover crop. 

Surviving a Near-Death Farm Accident

In 2023, a tree fell on Ray McCormick while he was in his trackhoe doing tornado cleanup. McCormick survived the near-death experience — and so did his leg, which actually died due to sustained crushing. // “The nurses said a lot of people would have gone into shock and died right on the spot or they would have lost that leg,” McCormick says. “I was luckier. I never thought about losing it, only about recovering. If I'd have lost my leg at the hip, it would have ruined my life. There wouldn't have been any duck hunting or going out with the dogs, and it would have been real hard on the farm.” // Just a few days after the accident happened, McCormick recounted the life-threatening events in an interview from his hospital bed. Click here to watch the interview.

“I realized right then, I’ll never question if cover crops are worth it,” McCormick says. “Where there's a cover crop, we're collecting soil. The cover crop and stalks are slowing down the current and grabbing the mud like gills of a fish. That mud is money.”

McCormick has duck blinds in the floodplains, which are coated in a layer of mud during spring floods. One year, while cleaning off one of the blinds, McCormick decided to let the mud dry on one of the benches and measured ⅜ of an inch of dried soil.

“⅜ of an inch equates to about 30 tons per acre of topsoil,” McCormick says. “So then I had it soil tested, and it was the most fertile soil you could imagine — the pH, the cation and exchange capacity, the organic matter. We knew phosphorus would be there, but to my surprise, it was loaded with potash. It was really the perfect soil. And why wouldn't it be? What's eroding the fastest is the top layer of soil, which has the most organic matter. I’m collecting what farmers are losing — some of the best soils in the world.”

Ahead of corn, McCormick uses a mix of 60% annual ryegrass, 20% balansa clover and 20% crimson clover seeded at 13 pounds per acre. The ryegrass has a smaller seed than cereal rye, which works better with his air seeder, and the white bloom on the balansa clover attracts bees, unlike the reddish bloom on crimson clover. 

When going to soybeans, McCormick seeds 12 pounds of annual ryegrass and 1 pound of turnips. The turnips add diversity, and deer love to eat them, which is great for McCormick’s landlords who like to deer hunt. He plants soybeans green into the cover crop mix and terminates the covers with a burndown and pre-emergent spray mix for the soybeans.

“I had soybeans growing in mature annual ryegrass, and they did phenomenal,” McCormick says. “Now we did have every prairie vole in the county in there, but the beans did really well. Beans are very forgiving when burning down cover crops. Corn is the opposite.”

Cover crops need a “perfect kill” right before planting corn, according to McCormick, or it will cause a yield hit. He aims to plant corn at least 48 hours after the Roundup application to give the herbicide time to penetrate the cover crop before planting.

McCormick and his son have 40 cows and also use the cover crops for grazing. For haylage, he seeds a mix of annual ryegrass, turnips and triticale at 100 pounds per acre in the fall. Those fields are fertilized in the fall and spring, similar to a wheat crop. The covers are baled for haylage and rolled into airtight bags while still wet, resulting in high-quality hay that lasts 2-3 years.

“We're fortunate to grow great cover crops here,” McCormick says. “Living in an area in which a lot of cover crops are used makes it more socially acceptable to grow cover crops. I had someone from Illinois call me with all these great questions, but he's worried about what's going to be said about him at the coffee shop because he's growing cover crops and that's a threat to all those who are chisel plowing their ground and their generations of tillage.” 

Conservation Commitment

Although many of the farmers in the Vincennes area are sold on no-till and cover crops, McCormick still is an outlier on the lengths he’ll go to protect the environment. He sees huge potential for farmers to cash in on solar panels, and he consults with a number of companies about how to build solar panels so the land around them can still be used for farming. This eliminates the companies’ cost of maintaining the land and gives farmers additional revenue streams — on top of the money they receive for leasing the land under 40-50 year contracts.

“Farmers are guaranteed money with solar,” McCormick says. “There are 5 coal-fired power plants on the border of this county, and 4 of them are slated to be shut down because they're losing money on them. The utilities are paying for coal, which is too damn expensive compared to renewable energy.”

McCormick isn’t afraid to challenge corporations or government agencies on projects that affect Indiana’s land. Some property belonging to McCormick’s wife borders U.S. 50, which was being expanded from 2 to 4 lanes. The project required 26 acres of wetlands to mitigate the highway’s impact, and the state attempted to take ownership of the property. McCormick, who supported the creation of wetlands but not the transfer of land ownership, fought back.

“I said, ‘I want the land,’ and they said, ‘We can't do that by law,’” McCormick says. “I said, ‘Well, then change the law because you don't want to take care of the wetland. I want to take care of the wetland, but I don't want to give up the land.’ And by God, they got the law changed, so I was the first one ever to be able to retain ownership of a mitigation site for the Indiana Department of Transportation.”

McCormick ended up knowing the person in charge of the company hired to do the wetland restoration, so he was able to influence the design plans for the project as well. Adjoining land was eligible for CRP Enhancement (CREP) dollars, which come from the state. McCormick says USDA officials told him the money could only be used to plant trees, but he pointed out to them that CREP had wetlands provisions.

The officials then argued that he was going into an archaeological site because, while no one had done any digging, it was suspected to be the site of an early Native American village. McCormick employed what he calls “creative borrowing” for the site plans. He pulled a dirt pan through serpentine borrow areas in the interior of the restoration site to create the berms.

“I was really good at envisioning how you can enhance the wetlands vs. what the engineers would draw up,” McCormick says. “They just draw up the berms, and that's it. I'm like, ‘Quit doing these boring restorations.’”

McCormick’s persistence and willingness to speak up against wrongs has already impacted thousands of acres in Indiana and beyond. After 40 years of talking to farmers about no-till and other conservation practices, he’s learned that there’s no one reason that appeals to everyone.

“My favorite question for conservation speakers is what made you decide to do all of this?” McCormick says. “People get emotional. Each of them has a reason, and it's very personal. It's not because they wanted to make more money. They're doing it to preserve the land for their children or to use less labor or a religious belief that they're here to take care of the land. And so when people ask how do you get everybody to do it? There is no one answer to that. It’s different stimuluses that play into people's lives that get them to do this.”