After moving to the farm in 1976, I had this grand vision of being an organic farmer. Organic production was presented as the only way to go, because it was so good for the environment. I bought into that. But after farming organically for 2 years, which requires doing a lot of tillage, I was seeing some soil degradation. So I began to look for something better.

I got a phone call from a colleague of mine one day, and he said, ‘You’ve got to come and see this thing.’ It was a strip-till machine. When I heard strip-till — you could have said, ‘vegetables on Mars,’ and it would have meant the same to me. So I went to this place just south of Northfield. He was a hog farmer, a grain farmer and a metal magician. He’d built this thing that would till only a small strip throughout the field. 

He farmed in some pretty hilly areas, so he needed to till this way to avoid erosion. I loved what it did, creating tilled zones that were deep, yet retaining most of the crop residue. He didn’t even have to broadcast fertilizer and work it in, because the fertilizer was placed by the delivery system built into the machine. That first machine was a little on the crude side: it had markers instead of a GPS, which was very strange. But when I looked at it, I thought, ‘Wow. Somebody finally hit the dinner plate.’

A year or…