Staying true to the impact that farmer-to-farmer education has on encouraging adoption of no-till, the USDA changed the course of ag history by appointing a no-tiller to a key position in the early 1990s.

No-Till Legends Randall Reeder and Bill Richards recently reminised over Richards' influence on the adoption of no-till across the U.S. Richards served as the chief of the Soil Conservation Service, which later became the NRCS, in Washington, D.C., during the George H.W. Bush presidency in the early 1990s. Reeder spent 32 years as an extension agricultural engineer at Ohio State University, focusing on reducing tillage and soil compaction.

Bill Richards: A student we had when I was at Purdue was a young guy named Jim Moseley who started no-tilling with me. He had gone to Washington as that ag representative. There's always an ag representative to EPA. We were both members of the Farm Foundation and knew each other and knew Clayton Yeutter (U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from 1989-91) really well. The assistant secretary of USDA, which has the Forest Service and the Soil Conservation Service, job became available, so they brought over young Jim Moseley and made him an assistant secretary.

Moseley and Yeutter had a chief that they were sort of having trouble with, and that was at the time that the 1985 Farm Bill was just being implemented. The Soil Conservation Service was trying to tell farmers how to do it, so Jim reached out to me and said, “I don't know whether I can get you past the White House. How much did you donate last year?” I said zero, but Clayton Yeutter knew what he was doing. He and Jim made me the chief, which was the first job I ever had off the farm.

Randall Reeder: So you spent about 3 years in Washington, D.C., finishing out the George Bush term, and in that time, you promoted no-till.

Richards: At that time, we were more worried about reducing erosion than we were soil health. In the early days of no-till, we didn't know that we were going to be gaining organic matter by not destroying that residue by turning it over.

We started out with the idea that we're going to sell farmers on this whole thing of how to meet these requirements with no-till, and we were pretty successful. We had what we called a residue management campaign, and we contacted all the major farm press and told them what we were trying to do. They all combined their emphases and wrote about it.

Now I was operating in a little danger because White House policy said an agency is not supposed to advertise or work with media. Well, I broke all those rules. What could they do with me other than send me home?

Reeder: You definitely influenced how we measured things. I remember we had setups to measure crop residue after harvest, and of course, the goal was 30% residue cover after planting. That was not easy to accomplish, especially with soybeans. As I recall, one of my friends, a researcher at Ohio State University, took measurements for half a dozen different types of tillage with soybeans. The only one that met 30% soybean residue left was pure no-till. That was one thing that was key from that time frame that made a big impact in those 3 years.

Richards: We called no-till a revolution on the land. I didn't name it — a guy from LIFE Magazine was there, and he said, “I hear there's a revolution going on.” I got a cover out of it and a lot of promotion.

The next revolution is adding cover crops. When I was chief, we had a whole division called plant material centers. I visited 3-4 of them and asked why they weren't working on cover crops. I don't know whether they are yet, but they ought to be turning out research to find us plants that mature in the spring and seed themselves and are a cover crop in the fall.

Reeder: A permanent cover crop would be a fantastic change.

Richards: If we can sell farmers on cover crops, we’ll be doing history a great, great favor. We'll be feeding more people with less resources, and we'll really raise productivity long-term.