While moderating a roundtable session at last winter’s National No-Tillage Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, Paul Schaffert, a no-tiller and owner of Schaffert Mfg., fielded a question from a no-tiller who was having a difficult time getting his John Deere 750 no-till 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 forklift 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…