It was the last soybean field Jim Maw and his Dad planted during the 1989 season, and the weeds had been waist high before a burndown. Jim picked out a 20-acre plot and waded in with a rented International 5400 grain drill for his first try at no-till. His Dad told him he’d never make back the cost of the seed

“That fall after I’d harvested the first round and knew it was yielding well, I made him combine the rest,” Maw recalls, chuckling. “The no-till beans were the best we had.” He says that was before yield monitors and harvests were measured by wagon size, but he remembers the no-till plot produced a 45-to-50 bushel-per-acre crop compared with the rest of the farm’s 40-bushel harvest.

“It wasn’t pretty, but it proved to me it would work,” Jim recalls.

Two years later, all the soybeans on Mooremaw Farms were no-tilled. Another 15 years passed before Maw realized his no-tilled corn was out-yielding his conventional fields, an epiphany that caused him to abandon tillage on the entire operation. He still works wheat stubble lightly before planting cover crops, however.

“We are now soybean farmers who rotate,” he explains. Today, he and son, Kyle, farm 1,000 acres of no-till soybeans, corn and winter wheat along with 50 acres of alfalfa which serves as a valuable rotation tool on their home farm’s rolling heavy-clay soils. They also do custom work on another 1,000 acres on nearby farms. 

The Maws farm near Courtright, Ont…