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.

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.

Some might consider Dan Peyton a “weekender” farmer, as he divides his time between no-tilling 300 acres of corn and soybeans and a full-time job at a nearby printing firm in Long Prairie, Minn.

I tell my neighbors that I don’t want to farm anymore. I just want to farm smarter. That philosophy was the reason we went with no-till in 1986, and it’s the driving force behind other steps that we’ve taken to make farming more efficient and profitable.