Wet fall, wet spring, wet fall, wet spring. It seems no-tillers need to get used to making things work in a more aquatic-type system, our recent survey of No-Till Farmer readers found. In fact, how our readers’ no-till planter setups worked in wet conditions was a common thread in the replies we received.

“I can't get my wife to no-till the garden,” laments Bill Coppess while walking through the family tomato patch on the way to one of his residue-covered, Ansonia, Ohio, wheat fields.

It doesn’t seem possible that I’ve been no-tilling for 30 years. I don’t know if you would call me a pioneer, but no-till was almost unheard of in north central South Dakota in 1979.

Alan Ballensky rolls his 4730 John Deere self-propelled sprayer to a stop in a cloud of dust at a field edge on his southeastern Montana small grains no-till operation.

The more Jim Millar works with cover crops, the more credit he’s willing to give them — credit for soil building, nutrient recycling, water infiltration and the nitrogen credit for the following crop.