Our shift to no-tillage started after we attended a Top Farmer Crop Workshop at Purdue University in 1989. We were told about the big gains that some of the early no-till innovators were getting by seeding soybeans with a no-till drill rather than in 30-inch rows. It seemed like a good system to consider.

If I had to pick out one consistent thing about no-tilling that I have observed over and over, it is that most no-till benefits come with continuous no-till — season to season and crop to crop. That’s the message I delivered last winter to attendees at the 2005 National No-Tillage Conference just a few days after I retired from the Natural Resources Conservation Service. And it’s the message I would like to expand upon as a private consultant: It’s time for the no-till community to aim higher.

Karl Kupers ticks off the three ingredients he says are musts to make a Pacific Northwest farm sustainable: continual learning, discovery and persistence. They've been his rules to live by for the past dozen years.

When we're asked if we “created” our name as a marketing strategy, we are quick to point out we’re the fourth generation of Sweets to grow sweet corn in northeastern Ohio. My great-grandfather Dermott Sweet started the operation in 1880, and for more than a century we were primarily a wholesale company.

We started no-tilling almost by accident in the late 1970s in southern Idaho. One of our spring barley fields was set back by frost and didn’t grow very tall.

LIKE MANY NO-TILLERS, especially in our area of Ohio, we were frustrated with our early experiences. Way back in 1977, after our local dealer demonstrated the 5100 White no-till planter to my dad, one-pass farming looked really appealing.

When I studied pomology at Cornell University in the early 1980s, I didn’t envision that my future business success would hinge on growing pumpkins, squash and sweet corn.

I can trace a lot of what I’ve learned about no-tilling directly back to attending the National No-Till Conference.

During the past three decades, I’ve had the opportunity to evaluate no-till agriculture in southern Illinois from three perspectives.

One of the first things I like to do when I talk to no-till farmers is to explain why my long title – rhizosphere ecologist – fits right in with what they’re trying to achieve with direct seeding or no-tilling. (The terms are generally interchangeable).