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NAME: Gordon Stoner

FARM: Stoner Farms

LOCATION: Outlook, Mont.

YEARS NO-TILLING: 22

NO-TILL ACRES: 12,000

CROPS: Durum, green field peas, lentils, flax and corn

Pulse crops have facilitated some massive changes on my farm and to our region as a whole in the last two decades. My wife Bonnie and I are the fourth generation of my family to farm the great glacial plains that make up Northeastern Montana.

Our farm near Outlook, Mont., located just short of the Canadian border, celebrated its centennial in 2009. There were changes throughout that century of farming to be certain, but during our tenure the farm and our region as a whole has gone through a complete transformation.

Gordon Stoner

I returned to the farm in 1980, splitting my time between town where I worked as a certified public accountant and the farm where we raised wheat in a traditional summer fallow rotation. Each year about half our acres were growing wheat while the other half were tilled repeatedly all summer to keep weeds in check and hopefully stockpile some moisture for the next crop of wheat.

We were burning through our organic matter with this cropping strategy, mining the valuable material for nitrogen (N) and depleting fields to about 1% organic matter on average. It also wasn’t consistently all that profitable. Marginal rains and temperamental markets made wheat a gamble that only rarely paid off in a big way.

That was true up until about 20 years ago when…