Talk to 10 no-tillers and you’ll probably hear 10 slightly different viewpoints on why it pays to quit disturbing and start building the soil. At Sheridan Farms, we’ve got our list, too. We’ve been able to drop from five marketed crops to two or three without any loss in productivity or farm income.

The biggest crowd in years, more than 700 people, attended the 14th annual National No-Tillage Conference in St. Louis and went home with plenty to think about and put to use on their farms.

Most modern agronomists would laugh at the planting dates followed by our forefathers. Times were different. The economy was different. And the information we knew about the soil, most effective planting dates and what it ultimately means to the crop was definitely different.

My first “no-tilling” experiences were in 1989 when I planted soybeans directly into old corn rows. I saw immediate labor and fuel savings and harvested yields that were consistent with conventional tilling.

While most Corn Belt no-tillers grow only corn and soybeans, Charlie Hammer prefers a three-way rotation. The operator of Hammer & Kavazanjian Farms with his wife Nancy Kavazanjian at Beaver Dam, Wis., prefers a no-till rotation evenly split between corn, soybeans and wheat in the farm’s 2,300-acre operation.

Even with a cold and wet spring in 2004, Tim Goodenough readily saw the many benefits of no-tilling with corn yielding as high as 265 bushels and soybeans reaching 67 bushels per acre.

One of the best pieces of advice we got before shifting to continuous no-till is to get your fields in the best shape possible when making any major changes in your farming methods.