For more timely no-tilling, John Deere in late August introduced the 1990 CCS no-till air drill as a replacement for the 1890 model. For big-acreage growers, these new no-till drills offer many options for designing a high-capacity seeding rig to fit your operation.

Karl Kupers ticks off the three ingredients he says are musts to make a Pacific Northwest farm sustainable: continual learning, discovery and persistence. They've been his rules to live by for the past dozen years.

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.

When several University of Kentucky agronomists and others headed to South America 35 years ago to show farmers there how to no-till, little did they realize that demonstrating this new technology would eventually turn Brazil into a major player in the world food market and a serious competitor for our grain exports. It’s not likely that they foresaw the eventual impact this would have on prices being paid to American farmers today.

We started no-tilling almost by accident in the late 1970s in southern Idaho. One of our spring barley fields was set back by frost and didn’t grow very tall.

Whether his 12-row, no-till planter needs it or not, Maury McLean usually spends part of the winter trying to figure out ways to make the machine more efficient. “I always get enthused about the new growing season by early March and make some last-minute changes and upgrades to the planter,” says the veteran Lancaster, Wis., no-tiller.

PETE GOTTFRIED ROLLS his office chair over to the horizontal file. He instantly pulls out a snapshot of a field that resembles a parking lot. Heavy rains can cause the sticky, tight soils, high in magnesium, to crust and compact, explains the Nevada, Ohio, no-tiller.