Jim Patton bends down and scrutinizes the miniscule green leaves barely poking through the Mad River Valley soils on his West Liberty, Ohio, farm.

If you're interested in harvesting top yields with Roundup Ready no-till corn and soybeans, it’s likely that you’ll have to add residual herbicides to the weed-control mix.

The temperatures are turning slightly colder but the No-Till Farmer message board, Farmer’s Forum, is starting to heat up. This month no-tillers tapped away at their keyboards and started discussions about ridding their fields of volunteer trees, powering their no-till planters and many more hot topics within the no-tilling world.

Plenty of good ideas for no-tillers came out of last summer’s 35th annual Top Farmer Crop Workshop at Purdue University. Here’s a quick rundown on the “best of the best” ideas.

As the name suggests, a new pre-plant or pre-emergent herbicide named Keystone will help no-till corn growers do a better job of controlling grasses and broadleaf weeds next year.

No-till corn growers have two options for pre-plant weed control — they can incorporate a residual herbicide in the fall, or burn down weeds in the spring with a contact herbicide.

With winter annual weeds increasing in many no-tilled fields, Mark Loux says mild winters make the problem even worse.

Curt Swartzmiller stands in front of the meeting room with a majestic 6-foot tall metal pole. The prop for his conservation speech is a driven ground tool.

Since soil creatures definitely have a positive impact on soil quality, no-tillers normally do all they can to manage their soils in ways to protect and nurture these valuable creatures.