Where I live, city and rural life co-exist 100 yards apart. That’s how close urban sprawl has come to our family’s Walnut Row Farm on the outskirts of Iowa City, Iowa.

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 it comes to measuring performance, Chuck Fulk maintains the seed meter on your no-till planter is comparable to the beating heart in your body. Without exceptional seed meter performance, you can’t expect to harvest a top-yielding crop.

As a young farmer, it bothered Ralph Holzwarth to see soil wash away after heavy spring precipitation and then blow away during long, hot summers. He thought there must be a better way.

When you're expanding, nothing is more important than making the most efficient use of your time and equipment while boosting yields.

Ask Doug Smith the difference between Canadian and U.S. no-tilling, and he'll give you a straight answer.

Corn and soybeans. Soybeans and corn. To many no-tillers, these are the staple crops of their farming operations. But for the Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Western Canada regions, farmers often concentrate on small grains-proving that no-till works for other crops.