When it comes to finding ways to trim costs, Plains growers are trimming tillage, seeking alternative crops, finding new ways to expand corn and soybean acres farther west, extending rotations, eliminating fallow with annual cropping and giving new herbicides a try.

With dollars becoming more scarce for investing in structural conservation practices, staffers at Nebraska's Lower Elkhorn Natural Resources District were seeking ways to meet erosion control goals. As a result, they considered cost-sharing cultural practices as a way to get 80 percent of the land meeting "T" erosion requirements by 2010 and 100 percent by 2025.

More than 100 years ago, long before all the Y2K hype, talk of the millennium and the existence of no-till, Charles Down’s great grandfather bought a farm. He tilled the soil, used draft horses and walked every step of the 240 acres behind his plow. The farm prospered and was systematically inherited by the next generation.

As urban areas stretch further into the countryside, adding more acres often requires no-tillers to buy or rent land located miles from their center of operation.

When you see the number of no-till acres growing significantly in areas outside the Corn Belt, one of the interesting things is the complexity of many rotations. No-tillers in other areas of the country are getting more crops into their rotations and are making them work.

A few weeks ago, I spent several days in Denver, Colo., sharing ideas with agricultural leaders about the importance of agricultural research. This was at a meeting where attendees advised the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) on assessing soil resource research programs and planning future research needs.

To help the 660 attendees at the mid-January National No-Tillage Conference in St. Louis make critical decisions on controlling weeds and insects in no-tilled corn for 1999, technical representatives from American Cyanamid, Zeneca Ag Products and Monsanto outlined new compounds and label changes.