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.

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

“If you think no-tilling is just planting without tillage, you’re going to fail at no-tilling,” says Paul Jasa, an ag engineer at the University of Nebraska.

At age 68, John Everts has embraced no-till farming as a way to boost his per-acre profit, farm with less machinery and improve the soil.