Most modern agronomists would laugh at the planting dates followed by our forefathers. Times were different. The economy was different. And the information we knew about the soil, most effective planting dates and what it ultimately means to the crop was definitely different.

California has long been one of the most productive agricultural areas of the world. Partly for that reason, growers there are often understandably reluctant to try new farming methods, especially when rising fuel and labor costs and market competition are shrinking profit margins.

Even with a cold and wet spring in 2004, Tim Goodenough readily saw the many benefits of no-tilling with corn yielding as high as 265 bushels and soybeans reaching 67 bushels per acre.

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.