Just because you are no-tilling, it doesn’t mean that you are doing the best you can for the soil structure of the land that you farm, Sjoerd Duiker says.

Jim Koepke would be the first to tell you that he doesn’t consider himself a no-tiller. “There’s plenty of tillage activity going on in our soils, it’s just that the tillage is being done by earthworms instead of iron,” he says. “And those earthworms do a tremendous job.”

Back in the mid-1990s, millions of acres of CRP land that had been lying idle for 10 years were about to be released back to landowners.

Over the years, I have felt fortunate that I could promote no-tilling through educational work with conservation agencies and farmer organizations. I’ve been a member of my county Soil Conservation District for more than 16 years.

When people ask me for a quick answer to justify shifting to no-tillage, the best one I can come up with is this: Yield is not measured in bushels or tons per acre. Yield is measured in net dollars per acre. No-tilling equals more dollars in the bank.

When you think about being directly involved with saving a natural resource as significant as the Chesapeake Bay, it’s hard not to get excited. That noble thought might be enough reason all by itself to really hard sell continuous no-till systems, including cover crops and rotations. And when you can see clearly that no-till makes farming more profitable — in addition to the big-picture environmental equation — you can start to sense that we’re onto something, as they say, that’s really big.

With expected Environmental Protection Agency approval later this summer of Roundup Ready alfalfa, no-tillers will have a exciting new tool to add to their management arsenal. Having proven valuable with soybeans, corn, cotton, canola and other crops, adding the Roundup Ready technology to alfalfa offers many new forage cropping opportunities.

We started no-tilling almost by accident in the late 1970s in southern Idaho. One of our spring barley fields was set back by frost and didn’t grow very tall.