Jim Koepke would be the first to tell you that he doesn’t consider himself a no-tiller. “There’s plenty of tillage activity going on in our soils, it’s just that the tillage is being done by earthworms instead of iron,” he says. “And those earthworms do a tremendous job.”

At least four emerging trends could be spotted at the Farm Progress Show, the annual display of farm equipment and services held for 3 days this summer near Decatur, Ill.

Ray McCormick earns a living through good land stewardship. He operates a peach orchard, maintains about 1,000 acres of woods on his property and builds wetlands and mitigation sites for other landowners.

Our gradual transition to conservation tillage began 43 years ago when we parked the moldboard plow and hooked onto a chisel plow in 1964.

When the Tru-Vee type planters were first introduced, the opener discs were designed to make a V-shaped furrow in loose, tilled soil to create a prime environment for proper seed placement. As time progressed, farming practices began to move away from total tillage to minimum-till and today’s highly popular no-till.

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.