Everyone's farm is a big puzzle. All farmers have access to mostly the same 20,000 or so pieces. The challenge is we each only have about a 300-piece puzzle, and we’re each responsible for picking the pieces that fit together to make our specific system work. There’s no one perfect picture that works for everyone.

My family and I are constantly working on our puzzle, and we’ll never be done. I farm in partnership with my parents, Jim and Laurie Isley. We firmly believe you should never be so married to a particular farm management puzzle piece that you can’t trade it out for a new one as the need arises.

This was the case when we made the transition from conventional tillage to no-till and strip-till in 2013. Our picture needed to change and so did a major piece in our puzzle — a corner piece, if you will.

The growing season of 2012 was a dry one. When working the ground in the fall, it was just nothing. No structure, no soil organic matter, it was just dirt because we were treating it like dirt. We realized we needed to start seeing it as soil and managing it as such. 

When we started thinking in terms of “soil” we understood there are…