Editor's Note: This article was originally published in January 2013.

Diversity Above the ground leads to robust soil health that powers profitable crop production, says no-tiller Gabe Brown.

Continuous no-till and a polyculture consisting of more than 25 different crops annually has increased yields, reduced input costs and solved a lot of problems for the Bismarck, N.D., no-tiller and rancher.

“As farmers, we sometimes spend all of our time treating symptoms,” Brown says. “Lack of fertility, compaction — I don’t care what it is — pretty much everything we’re trying to treat is a symptom. It’s not really the root cause of the problem.

“The cause of most of these symptoms, in my mind, is poor soil health.”

Brown focuses on feeding the soil, and letting the soil feed the crop. He accomplishes that with a diverse no-till system of cash crops fortified by a nearly constant rotation of cover crops.

With no commercial fertilizer, fungicides or pesticides — and limited herbicide use — the Brown family had a farm average of 159 bushels per acre for their 2011 corn crop. The cost per bushel was $1.09, not including land costs. Annual rainfall is 16 inches, and the county corn average is less than 100 bushels per acre.

The keys to reducing production costs are found in letting the soil do the work, and that requires organic matter, he says. When Brown and his family purchased their operation in 1991, fields ranged from 1.7% to 1.9% organic-matter content. In 1994…