No-tillers will be able to buy corn, soybean, wheat and field-bean seeds based on seed counts starting Jan. 1 after the National Conference on Weights and Measures recently approved standardized testing methods and procedures to verify seed count labeling.

My son, Mike, and I recently spent 6 days looking at no-till in the Palouse, a 3,000-square-mile area located in the southeastern corner of Washington, north central Idaho and northeast Oregon. While I've visited this area several times where no-tillers grow crops on slopes as steep as 60%, I’d never been there during harvest of wheat, barley, peas, lentils and garbanzo beans.

Over the past 38 years, we've produced a handful of No-Till Farmer articles on no-tilling corn and other crops into a living cover, such as alfalfa sod, cereal rye or wheat. But it’s a tricky maneuver and one that has not caught on among many no-tillers.