Back in 1996, we made a commitment to farm more land without hiring any full-time labor. Thanks to a shift to continuous no-till, precision farming and more efficient equipment, we’ve surpassed our goals.

One of the best pieces of advice we got before shifting to continuous no-till is to get your fields in the best shape possible when making any major changes in your farming methods.

When you think about being directly involved with saving a natural resource as significant as the Chesapeake Bay, it’s hard not to get excited. That noble thought might be enough reason all by itself to really hard sell continuous no-till systems, including cover crops and rotations. And when you can see clearly that no-till makes farming more profitable — in addition to the big-picture environmental equation — you can start to sense that we’re onto something, as they say, that’s really big.

Limited rainfall and plenty of warm chinooks moving east off the nearby Rocky Mountain range in late winter create an environment in which properly managing moisture is essential for Alberta growers.

Our shift to no-tillage started after we attended a Top Farmer Crop Workshop at Purdue University in 1989. We were told about the big gains that some of the early no-till innovators were getting by seeding soybeans with a no-till drill rather than in 30-inch rows. It seemed like a good system to consider.