One fall morning, I was scooped up and walked to my mom’s Red Cutlass and put in the backseat alongside my dog. A few hours later, Mom hurried me upstairs and dropped me in a barren bedroom. “Sit here quietly until your sisters come get you,” I recall, about 15 minutes before I got into trouble for the first time in my new home. 

The year was 1972. I was 3 years old. I learned years later that the move to this place called Wisconsin was so Dad could run something called No-Till Farmer (NTF).

I’m personally proud today to tell you that Frank Lessiter’s new book, From Maverick to Mainstream: A History of No-Till Farming, has arrived. It’s Dad’s 4th book in a long and influential career as an ag journalist.

It’s a story that needed to be shared, and it’s worth celebrating. In the days of “big iron,” no-till started out as a scoffed-at practice — when many farmers joked that it was “ugly,” or even “lazy,” farming. 

From Maverick to Mainstream is a chronicling of Dad’s personal history from the near-beginnings of no-till, as the only editor-in-chief of NTF since its founding in 1972. The concept was still in its infancy at that time, just 10 years after one “crazy” farmer in Kentucky tried it out on less than 1 acre.