For the last few years, Allen Below has been working on a learning curve, but he’s moving toward a day where he’s reduced or eliminated irrigation, restored his farm’s soils and is enjoying a better balance sheet.

Below and his partner brothers, Justin and Austin Littleton, began no-tilling their 7,000 acres of corn, cotton, rice, popcorn and non-GMO soybeans in 2014 near Parma in the Missouri Bootheel. They also began seeding cover crops the same year.

Below had been using a conventional/modified ridge-till system with a minimum of three trips across the field, and as many as six if fields were in poor condition, to get the beds ready.

So far, Below estimates he’s saved as much as $102 per acre by switching to no-till, which is helping to pay for his cover crop seed. It cost him up to $17 per acre alone for each tillage trip. He wants covers to do the tillage for him.

“Even though it’s pretty flat here we do get some soil loss,” he says. “When it rains a lot you see muddy water running down the ditches. We want to improve soil health, improve water infiltration and water-holding capacity, and grow our own nitrogen (N). The only way to make cover crops work well was…