We live on the edge with moisture here in dried-up northeastern Colorado.

Randy Rink used to have the typical Midwestern crop operation. He rotated corn and soybeans. With this 2-year rotation, Rink would disc corn stalks once in the fall, and plant soybeans in the spring. The next year, he would no-till corn into soybean residue.

It's somewhat ironic that trying to farm right out of college during a period of bad flooding in northeastern Saskatchewan led me several years later to cropping systems research in a semi-arid area where I could really use some of that excess water! Along the way, I did graduate studies in forage genetics at the University of Guelph in Ontario and at the University of Minnesota.