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NAME: Floyd Koerner III

LOCATION: Laingsburg, MI

YEARS NO-TILLING: 42

ACRES NO-TILLED: 500 

CROPS NO-TILLED: Corn, soybeans, alfalfa and cover crops

As a family LLC, there’s more than one decision maker on our farm. My dad, Floyd Jr., is the more progressive one. For my part, I like to see someone else try new things out first.

We’ve had lots of friendly family discussions over the years and, with some give-and-take, have hammered out crop-management strategies that work for us.

The main strategy paying dividends today is our fertilizer program. We’re working to refine our program to where we apply the least amount of nitrogen and other inputs while still building yields.

We’ve made great strides through variable-rate applications, banding and splitting applications, and using cover crops. Long before we started working on fertility, though, Dad took the first steps to conservation tillage.

We raise corn, soybeans and alfalfa in the hills near Laingsburg, Mich. The topography has always been a challenge. During the early 1960s, Dad started building and maintaining grass waterways to curb erosion. But a barn fire in 1969 propelled him to the next step in conservation.

The fire claimed our planter and Dad replaced it with a no-till planter. I was 12 years old at the time, and we’ve been no-tilling or strip-tilling since then. We were one of the first farmers in our area to try no-till and have had more than one obstacle to overcome in the last 4 decades.

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