No-till has resulted in our area having what I would venture to say are some of the strongest capitalized farms in the country. In fact, no-till is one of the only reasons we have farming in the area at all.

I was born into no-till, you could say. It’s really all I’ve ever known. My grandfather was a big proponent for the environment and was an advocate when my Dad pushed for reducing tillage on our farm in the early 1990s.

We weren’t farmers when my family moved to northwest Nebraska in 1995. I grew up in the mountains of Colorado with my mom, Nancy, who was working as a veterinarian and my dad, Rex, an architect.

In the last 10 years I’ve seen no-till declining in my area. I simply don’t understand it, maybe it’s the draw of recreational tillage as we like to call it, but to me it’s just not sustainable in the long run.

WATCHING SOME OF the best soils we owned wash away in a big storm accelerated my family’s move to 100% no-till. My father, James, had tried no-tilling in the late 1960s, starting with soybeans behind the small amount of wheat we grew at that point.

Some of the soils I helped farm as a child in southwestern North Dakota are probably somewhere in South Dakota now. I grew up in the era of wheat and summer fallow. A lot of the ground around here is very sandy and marginal. Did it ever blow when we were tilling. I remember as a kid getting sent with a disc or a drag to try and make it stop blowing. It seemed so futile, and it was.

WHEN WE STEP into our office, soil conservation posters serve to remind us why we do the things we do on our farm. Our soils need to be protected and nourished to keep waterways healthy and the nation’s food supply sustainable.

We’re not farmers, ranchers or loggers — we’re resource managers. That’s one of many mindset shifts our family has made as we transition from generation to generation farming wildly varying terrain near Lewiston, Idaho.

I started farming on the brink of the 1980s farm crisis. I graduated from high school in 1983 and was raring to continue in the farming tradition established by my father and grandfather.