Five years ago, Canadian no-tiller Craig Shaw had never heard of controlled-traffic farming. Today, he’s making a long-term commitment to the system.

When a farmer switches to no-till, they will probably find they can apply 60 to 80 fewer pounds of nitrogen in their cornfields, but still get the same yields.

The two careers that formed my life for the last 23 years started on the same day. A loan to purchase 320 acres adjacent to my family’s home farm, and an offer for a job as a local extension agronomist for Manitoba Agriculture, were mere hours apart.

After years of helping countless farmers make a lot of money, I finally decided to try and make a go of it myself. In 2007 I bought 7,000 acres of farmable ground in northeast Morawa, Australia, and am now officially a no-till farmer and consultant.

As farm sizes continue to increase, the size, working width and overall weight of farm equipment continues to grow proportionally. Some of the heaviest farm equipment has axle loads exceeding 20 tons.

To gauge the world’s supply of arable farming acres, an agricultural expert once compared Earth to the size of an apple, cut into 32 slices. The number of acres suitable for food production represents only one slice, and the apple’s skin represents the world’s supply of topsoil.