I'm very goal oriented. I spent 9 years working as a process engineer for ADM before our family made the move to my wife’s family farm in 2014. My corporate experience meant a lot of performance evaluations and structured goal setting, which I now apply on the farm. I want to take the great system my father-in-law, Roger Hubele, developed and continue to improve it. With my analytical nature, that means lots of testing, data gathering and evaluation.

Roger, now retired but still quite active and involved, is very innovative and had made the switch to no-till long before I came along. Back in 1969 he rented a no-till planter from a local dealership and tried it on 20 acres. Two years later he bought his own, even expanding to do custom no-till work for his neighbors. He found no-till was a great fit especially on tougher ground, such as our clay hills that are prone to erosion. Today we are 70% continuous no-till. We do still do minimum tillage on our flatter ground to work in ruts and manage weeds.

My brother-in-law, J.R. Hubele, and I now operate Roger's farm together and no-till certainly helps us be efficient farmers. We’re not farming more acres…