From adopting no-till to the latest sprayer technology, efficiencies gained weigh heavy on this Kansas operation

THE RUNNING JOKE in our area is there are only about 5 minutes each year when the timing is perfect to work some of our heavy clay soils and not make clods. In the late '70s, we made the move to just not till ahead of spring-planted crops.

The joke's no longer on us. We no longer had to worry about clods, and we saw other advantages.

Heavy gumbo isn't our only soil type, but those are the areas where we've seen probably the most improvement after decades of no-till. Before we would struggle to get the ground worked, create a good seedbed, get the seed into moisture and worry about crusting. With no-till practices, those issues eventually ceased to exist.

The most immediate benefit was saving time and money by reducing the passes we made in the field. We could do so much more with the manpower and equipment we had. We could never farm as many acres as we do now with our resources if we still had to work everything.

Soon after came benefits like moisture retention and reduced erosion. We grew a lot of milo at the time and found it grew just as good or better with no-till as it did with tillage. For a long time we still worked the ground ahead of wheat...