I’M A BIT of an adventurer. In my 20s I ran triathlons, then I traveled the country as a wind surfer and for the last 15 years I’ve enjoyed getting way off the beaten path with my dirt bike. I’m certainly not afraid to try something different or think outside the box and that’s true in my farming operation, too.

I'm very goal oriented. I spent 9 years working as a process engineer for ADM before our family made the move to my wife’s family farm in 2014. My corporate experience meant a lot of performance evaluations and structured goal setting, which I now apply on the farm.

When Randy Chapman started farming with his father, he knew they weren’t going to have the help they needed for labor. He also didn’t like the erosion he witnessed from tillage and realized they had to do something different.

Being the “scourge” of the neighborhood was one of the biggest challenges Norm Deets faced when he started no-tilling. But after 30 years of committing to the practice, he knows the benefits outweigh the nice look of perfectly tilled soils.

Moisture savings is what first sparked C. Dale Sybesma, my father, to be interested in no-till. In our flat southeastern corner of South Dakota, moisture is often a challenge.

My father and grandfather started experimenting with no-till in the late 1960s with the primary goal of stopping erosion. The steep hills we farm would simply wash away when you worked them up.

Ten years ago, when our operation was featured in No-Till Farmer, I told the editors that I would stay with no-tillage regardless of what happened.

Wet fall, wet spring, wet fall, wet spring. It seems no-tillers need to get used to making things work in a more aquatic-type system, our recent survey of No-Till Farmer readers found. In fact, how our readers’ no-till planter setups worked in wet conditions was a common thread in the replies we received.