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Name: Jim Arnaud (operates Arnaud Farms)

Location: Monett, MO.

Number Of Years No-Tilling: 24 (100 percent no-till since 1986)

Acres: 1,200 (crops over 1,600 acres each year because of doublecropping)

No-Tilled Crops: Corn, milo, Soybeans (doublecropped with rye or barley)

We have a lot going on at one time on our sixth generation southwestern Missouri crop and livestock farm. We milk 100 Holsteins, manage 200 Red and Black Angus crossbred beef cows, background the yearlings and grow all the feed we need on 1,200 acres of ground.

If we don’t juggle it all just right, none of it works 100 percent. Time management was the primary reason we switched to no-till, and today, you couldn’t pay me $200 an acre to go back to conventional tillage.

As a youngster back in the 1980s, I spent what seemed like ungodly hours clearing straw off harvested fields so we could move in with the chisel plow to prepare for doublecropped milo and soybeans. I thought surely we can figure out a way to get the seed into the ground without wasting all this time, because with doublecropping, time is money.

Much to my father’s dismay (he had a hard time giving up the moldboard plow) I started to dabble with no-till and could quickly see what a time-saver it could be.

BUILDING A NO-TILL SYSTEM

We started slow by hiring a neighbor to plant soybeans with his Tye No-Till drill, but the first no-till beans we tried were a…