Bringing regenerative practices to degraded soil is no easy endeavor. But Mac Kincaid looks no further than his family to understand why he punches the calculator, braves freezing temperatures during the winter to move livestock, and troubleshoots ever-present weather challenges.

Kincaid has shifted to no-till, diversified his rotations, added livestock to his rotation and eliminated P and K applications with deliberate agronomic management – all changes that have positively impacted his farm’s bottom line.

“I don’t want the farm to end with me,” he says, nodding toward a photo of his wife and 4 children while he was on stage at the National No-Tillage Conference. “I want to be a profitable enterprise that’s in it for the long haul.”

Kincaid is no-tilling about 1,000 acres of rocky soils in southwest Missouri amid drenching thunderstorms, drought, freezing temperatures and searing heat. Sitting at the foot of the Ozarks, his farms have plenty of terrain and shallow topsoil.

Kincaid shifted to no-till practices in 2012. A year later he added cover crops, and his first no-tilled corn crop was in 2016. Two years after that, he integrated livestock and dropped double-crop soybeans for first-crop beans.

Kincaid says he was more “university minded” about his farm’s evolution early one and would read many different studies about practices to try, but he wasn’t satisfied with the results. He changed his approach after meeting soil health expert Ray Archuleta and no-till legend Gabe Brown, who emphasized the five principals of regenerative farming: Reducing soil disturbance…