"If you want to double the size of your farm, farm vertically,” says Ray Rawson. The developer of several pieces of zone tillage equipment and a no-till corn and soybean producer from Farwell, Mich., for many years has taken the time to look beneath the soil surface. The result has been higher yields on his own and and many other farms.

When compacted soils become a problem, as they can anywhere in the country, cover crops can be an effective solution, according to experienced no-till farmers. But you need to know which crop will work in your area to provide the kind of long tap roots needed. Visitors to Farmer’s Forum, the message board of No-Till Farmer, offered a number of possibilities recently. We share their ideas here, as well as thoughts about an assortment of other topics.

A simple question about converting a disc to an aeration tool sparked a heated discussion on the No-Till Farmer message board this month. No-tillers gave their thoughts about making this conversion and also the compaction problems that can go along with no-tilling in cold, wet soils.

Rather than causing major compaction concerns, Lloyd Murdock credits long-term no-till with being able to solve many of your more troublesome soil worries. That’s what the University of Kentucky soil scientist learned from a recent 5-year study that looked at no-till and soil compaction as reported in a recent Soybean Digest article.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, many farmers in south-central Nebraska began drilling irrigation wells as they began flood irrigating row crops in furrows.