When we started no-tilling 25 years ago, we really weren’t trying to solve a soil erosion problem. We hadn’t thought it through that far and we just wanted to stay competitive by reducing costs. And it took several years and dramatic changes in our cropping systems before we started to see the real long-term benefits of no-till (which we call direct seeding).

For four days in early January, the focus of two very different worlds, both buzzing about the prospects of a more prosperous future, centered on the Marriott Hotel in downtown Des Moines, Iowa.

Our first serious no-till experiences in northwestern Ohio pretty much paralleled the introduction of the John Deere 750 no-till drill in the late 1980s. After seeing it run for the first time, my immediate thought was that this no-till drill had a chance to make a major impact on our agriculture.

A good no-tiller is apt to be a patient person. In Kansas, that virtue has been tested to the extreme as we work our way through one of the worst droughts of the past 75 years.

I tell my neighbors that I don’t want to farm anymore. I just want to farm smarter. That philosophy was the reason we went with no-till in 1986, and it’s the driving force behind other steps that we’ve taken to make farming more efficient and profitable.