We live in an area of Lancaster County, Pa., where small dairy farms of 50 to 60 cows are common and fields are small. Many of the farms are Amish-owned, where real horses provide the power.

Easy to work with and generally low cost, red clover is becoming a viable cover crop option for many no-tillers.

When it comes to no-tilling around Gettysburg, Pa., it’s quite a battle for Ed and Dan Wilkinson. While some of the land these no-tillers farm is where the most famous battle of the Civil War was fought, the battle for the Wilkinsons is taming the soils that make the transition to no-till tough.

Making the transition to no-till was a big step for Lapp Brothers Farms in making their soils more productive. But to get even more yield and tonnage out of corn silage meant taking a narrower view.

As a hog producer, Jeff Frey has a valuable asset with fertilizer prices rising rapidly. Yet, the Willow Street, Pa., no-tiller knows applying and managing hog manure in a no-till system has its challenges.

“Soil is meant to be covered.” Those are the words on Steve Groff’s favorite cap.

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.

Field scouting usually happens in broad daylight. But to scout for one indicator of the vitality of your no-till fields, it’s best to step out after dark, or dusk at earliest. Then look for earthworms.

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.