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.

One of the best pieces of advice we got before shifting to continuous no-till is to get your fields in the best shape possible when making any major changes in your farming methods.

When you think about being directly involved with saving a natural resource as significant as the Chesapeake Bay, it’s hard not to get excited. That noble thought might be enough reason all by itself to really hard sell continuous no-till systems, including cover crops and rotations. And when you can see clearly that no-till makes farming more profitable — in addition to the big-picture environmental equation — you can start to sense that we’re onto something, as they say, that’s really big.

When it comes to strip-tilling effectively, Tony and Doug Anderson benefit from both farming and equipment dealer experience. Besides farming 2,500 acres, the brothers own Anderson Equipment, a shortline dealership selling planting and tillage equipment at Washington Court House, Ohio.

If I had to pick out one consistent thing about no-tilling that I have observed over and over, it is that most no-till benefits come with continuous no-till — season to season and crop to crop. That’s the message I delivered last winter to attendees at the 2005 National No-Tillage Conference just a few days after I retired from the Natural Resources Conservation Service. And it’s the message I would like to expand upon as a private consultant: It’s time for the no-till community to aim higher.

When we're asked if we “created” our name as a marketing strategy, we are quick to point out we’re the fourth generation of Sweets to grow sweet corn in northeastern Ohio. My great-grandfather Dermott Sweet started the operation in 1880, and for more than a century we were primarily a wholesale company.