No-Till Living Legend and 2024 Conservation Ag Operator Fellow Ray McCormick shows the downstream impact of water and soil cascading from tilled fields in Vincennes, Ind.

Continuing the wet spring theme now from earlier in the show, veteran agronomist Ken Ferrie checks in from rain-soaked Illinois, where no-till is proving its worth on a field that received 5 inches of rain in less than 4 days.

One guy who’d love to get some of this rain we’ve been talking about, is Robert Boyle. He only gets about 7 inches of rain out in Coolidge, Ariz. But that’s not stopping him from using cover crops and strip-till.

In southeastern Wisconsin, where longtime no-tiller Tyler Troiola just got almost 2 inches of rain in one day. Throw in a tractor glitch, and it’s been a challenging spring so far. But thanks to no-till, Tyler’s fields aren’t completely covered in puddles.

On this episode of Conservation Ag Update, brought to you by Martin-Till, find out how several no-tillers are handling a wet month across parts of the Corn Belt. Central Illinois no-tiller Dave Brown is patiently waiting for Mother Nature to cooperate before he can finish up planting several hundred acres, while Wisconsin no-tiller Tyler Troiola deals with a tractor glitch and a 2-inch rain event in one day.

Josè Franco, USDA research agronomist, and his team at the U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center in North Freedom, Wis., are evaluating possible alternatives to only using cereal rye as a winter cover crop in the Upper Midwest.

“This is one of today’s biggest opportunities in conservation ag,” Mitchell Hora says. “The folks with data — the agronomist, the team around each farmer — we all need to be working together with the folks at the biofuel facility to go after these credits together."