No one thing got us into no-till, but every year we find more reasons to stay with it. In the 1970s and early 1980s, our farm management included my father, Doyle, my Uncle Jerry and a cousin, Roy. They had given up the moldboard plow in the 1970s and had switched to a chisel plow system, but were still doing a lot of tillage.

When I was a kid, I knew it was spring when the mud roared off our highly erodible hills, across the roads and flowed through our farm yard.

After sitting in on a no-till air seeder roundtable session during the 1998 National No-Tillage Conference, Donn Branton was primed for action. What he’d heard convinced him to consider a new way to achieve the precision planting necessary for attaining 100 bushel per acre yields of soft red winter wheat.

Even though the majority of John Deere 750 no-till drills are used to seed soybeans and small grains in the Midwest, that certainly doesn’t mean modifications made for efficient seeding in the Pacific Northwest won’t prove valuable in other areas.

Dean Markwardt, like 659 other no-tillers around the country, came to the seventh annual National No-Tillage Conference in St. Louis to reap the benefits of acclaimed speakers, network with accomplished no-tillers and participate in numerous no-till roundtables. Little did he know he would be the most envied no-tiller in the bunch.