“Mound height is the key to successful strip tilling, but I see a lot of people who don’t pay a lot of attention to the mound height,” says Jim Kinsella, who’s been making strip-till work for more than 20 years on his farm in Lexington, Ill.

Even with a cold and wet spring in 2004, Tim Goodenough readily saw the many benefits of no-tilling with corn yielding as high as 265 bushels and soybeans reaching 67 bushels per acre.

Nitrogen costs keep rising, forcing no-tillers to examine fertilization program options and their impact on crops and the bottom line. For some no-tillers, liquid livestock manure might be an option — if they can overcome concerns about odors or the feasibility of incorporation.

One of the best pieces of advice we got before shifting to continuous no-till is to get your fields in the best shape possible when making any major changes in your farming methods.

Some no-tillers, whether they recognize it or not, practice weed control without ever really coming to grips with the subject, says Bryan Young, a Southern Illinois University weed scientist.

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.

When it comes to strip-tilling effectively, Tony and Doug Anderson benefit from both farming and equipment dealer experience. Besides farming 2,500 acres, the brothers own Anderson Equipment, a shortline dealership selling planting and tillage equipment at Washington Court House, Ohio.