OUR farm in southwestern Iowa has been a leader in soil conservation since the “dirty” 1930s. My father was one of the first individuals to install field terraces on our highly erodible land to slow water runoff and save the topsoil. We’ve kept a copy of the Des Moines Sunday Register from October 1968 that describes how Dad (Edgar Wahling) and I constructed the first push-up grassed-backslope terrace in the United States.

When people ask me for a quick answer to justify shifting to no-tillage, the best one I can come up with is this: Yield is not measured in bushels or tons per acre. Yield is measured in net dollars per acre. No-tilling equals more dollars in the bank.

We started no-tilling almost by accident in the late 1970s in southern Idaho. One of our spring barley fields was set back by frost and didn’t grow very tall.

With a one-pass operation that places seed and fertilizer into an otherwise undisturbed seedbed and packs the furrow, no-till systems shine when it comes to both better yields and disease control, says Andy Lenssen, a Montana State University entomologist.