When Henry Falk was growing up on his farm, if a piece of machinery — new or used — wasn’t doing the job, his father would haul it to his shop and rebuild it with a torch and welder to make it work better.

After sitting in on a no-till air seeder roundtable session during the 1998 National No-Tillage Conference, Donn Branton was primed for action. What he’d heard convinced him to consider a new way to achieve the precision planting necessary for attaining 100 bushel per acre yields of soft red winter wheat.