As no-tillers lead the charge into the use of annual ryegrass as a cover crop, they are also discovering the potential setbacks.

Continuous corn acres rose sharply this year as many growers tried to capitalize on increasing corn prices.

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.

It's an understatement to say that we’ve had a lot of publicity since harvest of 2006, when the word got out that my farm had placed first or second in three categories of the National Corn Growers Association yield contest (including a first-place 347.26 bushels per acre in a no-till irrigated class) and also weighed out a world-record soybean yield of 139 bushels per acre with conventional tillage.

Galynn Beer's family has been successfully no-tilling for 20 years in western Oklahoma. “We were flood irrigating when we got started, and if you want a few challenges and obstacles, try no-tilling in flood irrigation,” says the director of sales operations with Agro-Culture Liquid Fertilizers in Guymon, Okla.

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