Ray McCormick earns a living through good land stewardship. He operates a peach orchard, maintains about 1,000 acres of woods on his property and builds wetlands and mitigation sites for other landowners.

It’s hard to remember when we didn’t do some type of no-tilling or reduced-tillage on our southeastern Illinois farm. We really got into high gear around the mid-1980s. Some of our first results were with corn planted into wheat stubble or a red clover cover crop. We took advantage of the PIK (Payment in Kind) federal farm program during those years to make a serious commitment to long-term no-tilling.

The first time i heard about no-tilling was at Kansas State University in 1973. We talked about studies being done in Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri and other places where no-till first took hold. I came home from those discussions and thought about putting no-till to work on our farm, but we faced a tough challenge. Based on KSU’s no-till handbook, our clay soils (shallow topsoil, super-tight subsoil) are classified as “needing special management” for no-till.

Moldboard plowing, lots of secondary tillage and costly, environmentally damaging soil erosion were natural partners on our land in the late 1970s. At that time, I was taking over the family farm located on the Canadian side of Lake Erie, about 60 miles east of Detroit.