The first time i heard about no-tilling was at Kansas State University in 1973. We talked about studies being done in Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri and other places where no-till first took hold. I came home from those discussions and thought about putting no-till to work on our farm, but we faced a tough challenge. Based on KSU’s no-till handbook, our clay soils (shallow topsoil, super-tight subsoil) are classified as “needing special management” for no-till.

More no-tillers, especially many who are adopting strip-tillage, are investing in assisted steering to make their efforts easier and more accurate. Assisted steering of both tractors and implements can boost precision field operations.

Several St. Louis National No-Tillage Conference attendees who use GPS auto-steer systems raised the question of adding more GPS wizardry directly to drills, planters and sprayers for reducing costly side draft on steep slopes.

For more accurate seeding and spraying, a few no-tillers are already starting to believe that global positioning satellite systems should be placed in the ground — where it may count the most.

I can trace a lot of what I’ve learned about no-tilling directly back to attending the National No-Till Conference.

With every new innovation that comes around to make our lives easier, there comes a price tag — usually a hefty one. And that rule of thumb is not set aside when it comes to auto-steering.

Our first serious no-till experiences in northwestern Ohio pretty much paralleled the introduction of the John Deere 750 no-till drill in the late 1980s. After seeing it run for the first time, my immediate thought was that this no-till drill had a chance to make a major impact on our agriculture.