Now a lot of the farmers we talked to here are finding ways to slash inputs and increase their efficiency in pretty challenging times, economically. I caught up with local farmer, Dave Brown, who no-tills and strip-tills near Warrensburg, Illinois, and he talked about how the growing season is going so far for him and also some of the things he's looking forward to seeing at the show this year.

Dave Brown: "Personally, I think on our farming operation, it looks pretty darn good. Maybe above our five-year average. I'm hoping for that, but we've had some nice rains here in the last couple of weeks, but there is areas in central Illinois that were without. And looking at what the Pro Farmer Tour said, that's probably going to be a realistic number I think for us. But here in central Illinois, we need a good crop because the prices aren't very good, but that's the same everywhere."

Noah Newman: Anything you're really looking forward to seeing here at the show this year. Has anything caught your eye yet in this first day here?

Dave Brown: "Well, I think there's a lot of things going on here. There's a lot of technology, always. The big equipment, I'm wondering where it's going to fit in on operations our size, the 16-row corn heads, the 50-foot platforms, the X9 combines. We're looking at things that are looking to maybe use less horsepower per acre. That's kind of our goal at our size, but we're even looking at other things that we can do with regenerative agriculture. I think that is going to be key. But always value added if there's some place to do it. But it's about trying to figure out either how to cut costs or to sell at a break-even price."

Some great perspective there from Dave Brown. As I said, he no-tills and strip-tills a lot of acres here in central Illinois and he also does a lot of cover crops as well.

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.