While the majority of U.S. industries are slumbering or showing modest signals of a possible recovery, U.S. agriculture really hummed in 2010.

When it comes to serving a specific cropping niche, few folks work with one that’s any narrower than Dale Kopf. The Genesee, Idaho, custom seeder is offering strictly no-till seeding in the Pacific Northwest, where the system is also known as direct-seeding.

As No-Till Farmer readers know, editor Frank Lessiter visited the Palouse region in the Pacific Northwest in early August during the 2010 small grain harvest. He observed that many Palouse (southeastern Washington, mid-central Idaho and northeastern Oregon) no-tillers and direct-seeders perform some residue handling after harvest.

When Bryan Poppelreiter pulls his no-till planter into the field, he understands that absolute planting perfection probably isn’t going to happen. But that doesn’t mean he won’t shoot for a picket-fence stand that pops out of the soil evenly up and down, as well as side to side.

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.

No-tillers share the attachments and adjustments that help them get planting operations right the first time out.

Planting depth is no place to get creative if you want to achieve uniform stands and optimize no-till corn yields. Paul Jasa, University of Nebraska Extension ag engineer, believes uniformity should be every grower’s goal.

Few no-till operations keep more detailed accounting records than the Wittman family farm at Culdesac, Idaho.

While corn and soybeans received the lion’s share of the press this year as prices moved sharply higher, wheat producers have also been enjoying healthy prices. It’s also spurring more interest in no-till winter wheat, which many soil experts say makes the ideal rotational crop with corn and soybeans.