Talk to any serious no-tillers and it won’t take long until you discuss the adjustments and changes they’ve made to their operations. Let’s face it — no-tilling isn’t a one-size-fits-all practice. In fact, the best operations include innovative tweaks and improvements to meet their particular circumstances. And once discovered, many of these improvements can be implemented in other no-till situations.

Take Les Seiler, for example. This no-tiller from Fayette, Ohio, found that while the rotary harrow is a useful tool, it wasn’t a cookie-cutter fit for his operation. In fact, he’s using a Yetter minimum-till hoe — used in an unconventional way —- to better manipulate his no-till residue, improve emergence and create more uniform stands.

“It’s basically a rotary hoe version of a residue manipulating tool,” he explains. “We used it to bust up the crust after we no-tilled our soybean crop after a hard rain. The residue fed through it well, so we thought we could try it on other things.”

That no-till innovation paid off. Working with a local dealer and Yetter, Seiler ended up mounting a minimum-till hoe on a cart rather than a three-point application.

Before Planting.

While no-tilling is traditionally a one-pass system, sometimes weather doesn’t allow the optimum planting conditions. In this case, Seiler found a real benefit for his new device. “We put it on a caddy cart,” he says. “That way we could pull it with a smaller tractor and sneak out in the field when it was too wet to…