I’M A LAWYER. It’s okay, please keep reading. I worked in investment banking and spent 6 years in New York City. Usually when you start down those paths, you stay on them. That wasn’t the case for me. It’s probably because I started my journey on a Kansas farm five generations in the making.

It didn’t take long before I got the itch to return to farming. In the 1980s my journey became a loop when I purchased land in Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas. At the time, farms in this area of the Great Plains were almost exclusively locked in a wheat-fallow rotation. We wanted to try and change that model.

Moisture was — and remains — the limiting factor. I’d heard a lot about no-till farming and thought it made a lot of sense environmentally and economically, especially in this semi-arid region. First, we tried continuous cropping wheat using no-till practices. That was done with a Yielder drill, which put down the seed in paired rows, and placed starter fertilizer in a 2X2 location to the seed. It worked well agronomically, but the economics still weren’t great. I will never forget selling wheat for $1.85/bushel in the mid-80s. It was hard to make anything pencil out at those prices.