We've been no-tilling for nearly 50 years. You’d think we’d have it all figured out by now, but there’s always something new to try or a novel problem to unravel on our Lam bertville, N.J., operation. That’s just fine. Our family has a long history of looking for new ways to do things. That’s how we ended up as some of the first no-tillers in the state of New Jersey

ROBERT: The soil we farm here in the hilly areas around the Delaware River can be rocky and shallow. There are fields where we only have 1 foot of topsoil to work with. Constantly pulling up rocks with tillage is one of the reasons my dad Robert Sr. gave no-till a try and put in the work to stick with it when it wasn’t an instant success.

He was always aggressive about trying new things. I was in high school when he stopped on the road to get a closer look at a field someone had no-tilled. He was conservation-minded, having already made efforts to stop erosion by building terraces.

No-till was tough going initially, but he was determined. By the time I got involved in running the farm in the 1980s, no-till had taken off, and there were more options for…