Welcome to my first installment of No-Till Notes. I’m looking forward to writing this column and sharing my no-tilling experiences with you. I hope to provide lots of no-tilling ideas you can use on your farm.

Necessity pushed Luther Welch into no-tilling. “The profits kept getting smaller and smaller, so we needed to farm more acres to survive,” he remembers.

The first time I saw what Dwayne Beck was doing on the irrigation research farm near Redfield, S.D. (before he developed the Dakota Lakes Research Farm), I knew we were on the verge of a new type of crop production in our area.

If your familiar with the cyclical weather patterns (very dry to very wet) we’ve experienced in North Dakota since I started no-tilling in 1986, the fact that I’m still in business might say an awful lot. Not only am I still no-tilling, but I have expanded from 1,000 to 4,000 acres of cropland. And thanks to the many hours I no longer have to spend in the field, I’ve built up a busy grain cleaning and processing business.

When I started no-tilling in 1989, I didn’t really understand many of the benefits, such as much-improved soil quality, that I would see later on.

Back in the mid-1990s, millions of acres of CRP land that had been lying idle for 10 years were about to be released back to 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.