Our gradual transition to conservation tillage began 43 years ago when we parked the moldboard plow and hooked onto a chisel plow in 1964.

“If you think no-tilling is just planting without tillage, you’re going to fail at no-tilling,” says Paul Jasa, an ag engineer at the University of Nebraska.

At age 68, John Everts has embraced no-till farming as a way to boost his per-acre profit, farm with less machinery and improve the soil.

OUR farm in southwestern Iowa has been a leader in soil conservation since the “dirty” 1930s. My father was one of the first individuals to install field terraces on our highly erodible land to slow water runoff and save the topsoil. We’ve kept a copy of the Des Moines Sunday Register from October 1968 that describes how Dad (Edgar Wahling) and I constructed the first push-up grassed-backslope terrace in the United States.