It's coming up on 40 years since we produced the first issue of No-Till Farmer. The first issue that went out in November of 1972 featured reduced-tillage innovators who are still no-tilling today.

While cover crops are becoming more popular among no-tillers, you’d better take a closer look at how the practice may impact crop insurance payments. Unfortunately, cover crops could inadvertently terminate your crop insurance coverage.

Few growers have thought about legally transferring saved Roundup Ready soybeans out of their grain bins to dump in the planter or drill when seeding no-till fields. But with the patents expiring on the older Roundup Ready soybean technology in 4 years, it might be a possibility.

My son, Mike, and I recently spent 6 days looking at no-till in the Palouse, a 3,000-square-mile area located in the southeastern corner of Washington, north central Idaho and northeast Oregon. While I've visited this area several times where no-tillers grow crops on slopes as steep as 60%, I’d never been there during harvest of wheat, barley, peas, lentils and garbanzo beans.