Over the years, no-tillers have seen the benefit of providing effective season-long weed control and its impact on profits.

While it's been known for a long time that young corn plants are typically shorter in continuous no-till corn fields, Tony Vyn maintains this doesn’t mean there is an overall lack of plant height across a field.

While passage last summer of the American Clean Energy and Security Act by the House of Representatives calls for establishing a cap-and-trade program to limit greenhouse gases, it’s expected to have a serious financial impact for farmers. However, the financial penalties will be much lower for continuous no-tillers.

Even with new innovations coming for maintaining refuge acres with genetically engineered (GE) corn, there’s solid evidence that many growers are not meeting the current requirements. In fact, one out of every four growers who plants genetically engineered corn is failing to comply with at least one important insect-resistance management requirement, claim staffers with the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) in Washington, D.C.

If you ran a fluffing harrow over some of your ground last spring just before planting, you may be surprised to learn that the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) no longer considers those fields to be no-tilled.

Plenty of no-tillers were faced with lengthy delays in getting their crops planted this spring. And the critical question was whether these unfortunate delays led to last-minute cropping changes, or whether growers were sticking with their initial cropping strategies.

Several recent developments in the pesticide area represent disturbing examples of how the environmentalists pay little attention to scientific facts. As a result, several pesticides and genetically modified organism (GMO) corn hybrids are under increased fire from lawyers and governmental agencies that could impact no-tillers.

Wisconsin growers first questioned the idea of a possible connection between potassium levels and soybean aphid populations in no-tilled bean fields. They wondered why they were often seeing a considerable variation in the aphid populations that were found in different areas within a single field.

Over the past few years, numerous benefits have been demonstrated for seeding annual ryegrass as a cover crop in a no-till system. However, another exciting benefit may be the use of this cover crop as an alternative method for controlling soybean cyst nematodes (SCN), which can cost a no-tiller as much as 15 bushels per acre in lost soybean yields.

When the board of the Pennsylvania No-Tillage Alliance spotted $25,000 in available grant funds to promote adoption of no-till, they swung into action. And they quickly upped the available dollars by partnering with farm equipment dealers and lenders to offer a comprehensive package to make no-till equipment more affordable and no-till more certain.