My father, Art, truly stumbled into no-till by pure happenstance. In the early 1980s he decided he needed to get away for a day or two so he took a drive to North Dakota.

As no-tillers we are definitely an oddity here in the highly productive San Luis Valley of Colorado. While we strive to keep our acres covered and undisturbed, the farmers surrounding us move masses of earth with every crop.

Rattling off the list of cover crop benefits may require stopping for a breath of air or two to get it all out.

A common point of discussion in agriculture is how many generations removed most consumers are from the farm. In my household we’re starting to talk in terms of generations removed from tillage.

The way our land erodes, there’s no way we’d be in business today if we were still farming the way we did 50 years ago.

If we’re talking cover crops, I could keep a person up all night. Cover crops are truly amazing in what they can accomplish, and the number of different hats they can wear on the farm.

Our first no-till planter came in on a truck in pieces. It was just iron frames, planter boxes and bits and parts.

Cover cropping may be a modern buzz term, but it’s a concept I first witnessed back in the late 1940s. I’m the fifth generation of my family to farm both sides of the Mason-Dixon line between Pennsylvania and Maryland, and was fortunate enough to watch both my father and grandfather work the land.