Roy Pfaltzgraff of PFZ Farms is a fourth-generation farmer who, along with his father, farms 2,000 dryland acres of Phillips County, Colo. Having worked as a professional bookkeeper, Pfaltzgraff is no stranger to numbers. This aptitude and a knack for asking the right questions allow him to interpret and apply almost 40 years of statistics to his evolving no-till operation

Pfaltzgraff credits his father with introducing no-till on the farm. By 1984, his father had noticed the connection between tillage and erosion, but still did tillage fallow. It wasn’t until Pfaltzgraff returned to the farm after college in 1999 that the Pfaltzgraffs decided to stop tilling altogether and they switched to chemical fallow. Although an improvement, the results weren’t what Pfaltzgraff had hoped, and he eventually left the farm due to lack of profitability and loss of his farm lease. 

In 2016, he was asked to return. If he didn’t return, the land would be leased out, and the family would stop farming. Pfaltzgraff agreed, but his return to the farm wasn’t without conditions. 

“I told my dad, ‘I’ll come back, but we have to change what we’re doing because I am not going to farm for 40 years and end up in the same boat that you’re in,’” Pfaltzgraff recalls. “He was physically and mentally exhausted.” 

The 2017 Colorado Conservation Tillage Association conference catalyzed the change. With the Haney soil test and a new crop added to the rotation, the farm’s transition from no-till with fallow to no-till with…