After years of field cultivation and disc ripping on his family's corn and soybean operation, Ben Pederson believed he was improving soil tilth. But visual indicators on his farm near Lake Mills, Iowa, began to leave him less convinced that full-width tillage was worthwhile.

Strip-till success doesn't happen overnight, but chances of succeeding may well depend on the management and equipment decisions farmers make as they adopt the practice.

I've yet to talk with a strip-tiller who claims to have a universal system that will work on any farm. And I expect I never will.

Although reducing tillage intensity can provide conservation benefits and cost savings, adoption of no-till and minimum till practices for corn production has been limited in some areas, particularly in the northern Corn Belt. In this environment, a shorter growing season and cold, poorly drained soils can lead to delayed planting, low and uneven emergence and lower yields for reduced versus conventional tillage. Strip-till has been proposed as an alternative minimum tillage system for areas and soils that are not well suited for no-till management.

More than a year of bone-dry weather in the Corn Belt and Great Plains may dim our memories of the 2009 harvest, when fields in some states turned into swamps and harvest stretched into March 2010.

Even during the driest of times the strip-till approach can still do a lot for farmers.