When you listen to Rick Bieber talk about how he measures crop results, you quickly learn he’s not a big fan of the word “yield.” No-tilling for over 4 decades, the Trail City, S.D., farmer certainly understands that yield is what pays the bills.

Over the years Bieber has no-tilled wheat, corn, soybeans, flax, radishes, chickpeas, lentils, buckwheat, peas and diverse cover crop mixtures on 5,000 acres of dryland ground that receives less than 20 inches of rain per year along with significant snowfall. The family’s farm also has a 600 head cow-calf grazing operation and grows alfalfa, grasses and forages to supplement winter feed needs.

When Bieber adopted no-till in the 1980s, he knew little about how or why the practice would eventually benefit his soils. Instead, he was simply searching for ways to trim labor costs and slash his equipment investment.

“I didn’t have the money to purchase all the iron it would take to do the tillage that was considered essential to be a successful farming operation at the time,” he says. “Plus, I had to make do with the aging small amount of equipment that I could afford. For economic reasons, I started using less tillage and looked for ways to cut input costs as much as possible.”

Bieber doesn’t specifically recall 30 years ago what made him look at crop results in a different way when he started measuring success based on bushels per inch of rainfall.

Back in the 1980s, the farm was producing…