While moderating A Roundtable at last winter’s National No-Tillage Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, Paul Schaffert, a no-tiller and owner of Schaffert Manufacturing, fielded a question from a no-tiller who was having a difficult time getting his John Deere 750 drill into the ground. The farmer was hoping for some advice, but no one had an answer.

Not long after the conference, Schaffert spoke to no-tiller Lynn Overboe of Kindred, N.D., and asked for his advice on the problem. Overboe, who no-tills 1,800 acres of corn and soybeans and had encountered dull blades on his 750, had an answer.

Sharp Idea

Overboe recently got some assistance from his neighbor who has a machine that sharpens the blades on his John Deere 750. A while back he’d used the same type of machine on concave discs on a drill he’d purchased. The drill’s large blades were dull from use in rocky soil. “The machine worked well to roll the blades back to a sharp edge, so I thought I’d try it with my 750,” he says.

Overboe, who recently received the Cass County Conservation Award for his no-tillage efforts, says that rolling the blades on the 750 drill was rather simple. He lifted the drill with a fork lift to allow enough vertical clearance for the disc rolling machine. “The nice thing about it is that it doesn’t remove any material from the blades, it presses it out to a sharp edge and makes it about an inch greater in diameter,” he…