Some of the soils I helped farm as a child in southwestern North Dakota are probably somewhere in South Dakota now. I grew up in the era of wheat and summer fallow. A lot of the ground around here is very sandy and marginal. Did it ever blow when we were tilling. I remember as a kid getting sent with a disc or a drag to try and make it stop blowing. It seemed so futile, and it was.

Our farm perplexed our crop advisor, Gerard Troisi. He consults with many farms in our area of Pennsylvania with a diverse range of production practices. But he struggled to explain how we increased our soil organic matter by 1% in just 3 years while consistently removing virtually all biomass.

As no-tillers we are definitely an oddity here in the highly productive San Luis Valley of Colorado. While we strive to keep our acres covered and undisturbed, the farmers surrounding us move masses of earth with every crop.

The way our land erodes, there’s no way we’d be in business today if we were still farming the way we did 50 years ago.

Our first no-till planter came in on a truck in pieces. It was just iron frames, planter boxes and bits and parts.

Cover cropping may be a modern buzz term, but it’s a concept I first witnessed back in the late 1940s. I’m the fifth generation of my family to farm both sides of the Mason-Dixon line between Pennsylvania and Maryland, and was fortunate enough to watch both my father and grandfather work the land.

No-till has definitely changed the landscape of our farm over the years, but it was a change in the farms around us in the late 1980s that gave us the push into no-till.