If we're building soil organic matter (SOM), we’re doing something right. 

There’s a lot of money to be made in SOM. The higher the SOM, the more moisture and nutrients are held in the soil, and the more microbes there are breaking down the nutrients to make them available to the crop and the more resilient your fields become when conditions from weather to input costs apply pressure.

Soil organic matter isn’t easy to build, but very easy to deplete. On our farm, SOM is trending up when it’s trending down on so many farms across the U.S. That turn likely started when we began to dabble in no-till with a rented county conservation district no-till drill in the early ’70s. 

We kept no-tilling a little more and a little more, adding attachments and adjusting our own planter to figure it out as we went. Some attachments didn’t last longer than 100 acres before we took them off.

Our soils are now very mellow due to years of no-till and cover crops.  Today, you could no-till our fields with almost any commercial planter straight off the lot. We use a…