There's plenty of speculation that two key no-till herbicides will be in short supply and cost more for the 2022 growing season. These two herbicides are glyphosate (Roundup, plus others) and glufosinate (Liberty, plus others).

Instead of leaving fields bare after corn silage harvest, adding a living mulch may help no-tillers prevent costly soil erosion and improve soil health.

While many of our readers certainly recognize the positive impact no-till has on their farm’s profitability, most haven’t recognized the environmentally-friendly value it also brings to America’s non-farm population. By combining the extra cropping value enjoyed by growers with the climate-friendly environmental benefits of this practice, it’s apparent to me that we’ve been underselling the overall worth of no-till.

While research on soil microbial health has mainly been done in a lab, greenhouse or in short-term field experiments, University of Illinois crop scientists have captured valuable crop rotation and tillage data from a 20-year field experiment.

Saskatchewan no-tillers certainly aren’t in a cheerful mood these days when it comes to carbon sequestration. It’s because they recently learned growers who use minimal tillage or low-soil disturbance cropping systems could be shut out of the potentially lucrative Canadian market for carbon credit offsets.

Instead of terminating a cover crop prior to no-tilling corn, soybeans or another crop, more growers are planting through a still growing green cover crop. Seeding a cash crop into a growing green cover crop that may range in height from just a few inches to over 6 feet tall allows both crops to grow longer in the spring.

With the climate becoming warmer, no-tillers are in a much better position to turn limited amounts of rainfall into higher yields than neighbors who are still using intensive tillage.