Welcome to my first installment of No-Till Notes. I’m looking forward to writing this column and sharing my no-tilling experiences with you. I hope to provide lots of no-tilling ideas you can use on your farm.

Kenny Holsing faced a bit of a quandary. The De Witt, Neb., no-tiller needed a combine upgrade, yet he hoped to gradually ease back a bit. “I’m getting close to retirement,” Holsing says, “and I have only about 400 acres.”

Talk to 10 no-tillers and you’ll probably hear 10 slightly different viewpoints on why it pays to quit disturbing and start building the soil. At Sheridan Farms, we’ve got our list, too. We’ve been able to drop from five marketed crops to two or three without any loss in productivity or farm income.

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.

If I had to pick out one consistent thing about no-tilling that I have observed over and over, it is that most no-till benefits come with continuous no-till — season to season and crop to crop. That’s the message I delivered last winter to attendees at the 2005 National No-Tillage Conference just a few days after I retired from the Natural Resources Conservation Service. And it’s the message I would like to expand upon as a private consultant: It’s time for the no-till community to aim higher.

A series of dry springs and a problem with potential carryover of a soybean herbicide back in the 1980s were the two primary incentives that drove us to try no-till.