No-till has definitely changed the landscape of our farm over the years, but it was a change in the farms around us in the late 1980s that gave us the push into no-till.

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.

The first impulse of many growers may be to plow under CRP ground when converting it back into cropland.

Their optimism as warm as the record-high temperatures that welcomed them in Cincinnati, no-tillers making up one of the largest crowds in the 16-year history of the National No-Tillage Conference eagerly absorbed information from top-notch presenters, as well as each other.

Booming prices for corn and soybeans have no-tillers looking to add additional acreage, and one source that might become available is expiring Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) acreage. From Oct. 1, 2007, to Oct. 1, 2010, more than 13.4 million acres are scheduled to come out of the program.

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.