The flexibility to harvest grain with either a combine or hooves is how Jimmy Kinder is protecting his no-till farm from market volatility.

For the second straight year, equipment purchases by no-tillers declined over the previous year. The drop in grain prices in 2014 certainly seemed to have an impact, as the average reader of No-Till Farmer eased back purchases from a farm average of $87,921 in 2014 to $64,938 ahead of the 2015 cropping season.

Year after year, fertilizer is the big gorilla in the room when it comes to farm expenditures. In 2014, the readers of No-Till Farmer spent an average of $85,513 per farm to feed their crops — far outpacing the average of $69,732 spent on average, per farm, for land rent.

As commodity prices continued their slide last year, no-tillers have continued to shift more of their acreage to soybeans.

Just one year after hitting an all-time high, the average farm size of No-Till Farmer readers fell to a 7-year low in the No-Till Operational Benchmark Study conducted by No-Till Farmer editors.

As of early spring, growers in California’s highly productive San Joaquin Valley didn’t expect to receive a single drop of surface irrigation water this year. That’s because of the “0 irrigation water allocation” posted by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation due to a lack of snow in the state’s mountain areas that would normally end up in canals as extremely valuable irrigation water.