"If you want to double the size of your farm, farm vertically,” says Ray Rawson. The developer of several pieces of zone tillage equipment and a no-till corn and soybean producer from Farwell, Mich., for many years has taken the time to look beneath the soil surface. The result has been higher yields on his own and and many other farms.

When it comes to learning what it takes to turn out profitable corn yields, many no-tillers find they learn a great deal from having contest plots on their farms.

Since herbicide-tolerant transgenic cotton varieties became widely available in 1997, the no-till cotton acreage has nearly doubled in the United States. A recent survey by the National Cotton Council indicates that no-till made up 29 percent of total cotton acres while reduced tillage made up 30 percent of all cotton acres in 2002.

You can't figure out what’s wrong with your no-till field. Your neighbor took a look and he couldn’t figure it out. You called in a couple of no-tilling friends to take a look and they couldn’t come up with an answer either.

When it comes to calculating seeding rates for no-tilled Roundup Ready soybeans, recent University of Maryland research indicates that you may not need as high a plant population as you might have thought to get top yields.

Turning your original no-till planter into something that better fits your specific cropping needs was a hot topic on the No-Till Farmer Farmer’s Forum message board recently. Also, veteran no-tillers hit the keyboards to voice their opinions about one farmer’s interseeding concerns and another no-tiller’s questions about his White 5100 planter.

Since 1988, Marion Calmer has seen no yield loss by reducing soybean planting populations down to 100,000 plants per acre in 15-inch rows.

Monsanto has received full U.S. regulatory clearance for the first biotech corn designed to control corn rootworm. The company announced in late February that both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has cleared YieldGard Rootworm for use in corn hybrids for resistance to this insect. Licensing the technology to other seed companies means a number of corn hybrids containing this technology will be available for no-tilling this spring.