Maintaining an Iowa Century Farm while fulfilling the family goal of leaving the land in better condition than it was received, has led Jack Boyer a long way from the conventional farming his wife’s grandfather used when he settled the farm.

No-till farming became a way of life early in the rolling hills of western Kentucky. Growers there, eager to protect their fragile soils, began to adopt the practice pioneered by local farmer Harry Young, who planted his first no-till crop in 1962.

In the staunch no-till country of western Kentucky, a group of dealers and their customers are working together to crack yield caps through the adoption of strip-till.

Over the past 5 years, Chris Perkins has been challenging conventional wisdom in corn production with a systems-approach banding program that has bumped yields on his southwestern Indiana farm by an additional 50-60 bushels per acre.

Until 2000, Tom Barcellos was a conventional farmer like all of his neighbors in Tulare County in south-central California.

Precise placement, intensive soil-sampling and cover crop experiments help cut New York strip-tiller Donn Branton’s fertilizer rates in half and significantly boost corn yields over 40-year career.

In 2013, the Gruhlkey brothers of Wildorado, Texas, were all in their 20s when they kicked off their own irrigated farming operation based on the latest water-use efficiency methods available to them at the time and strip-till management they had been using on their farm since 2007.

Ben McClure was a recent ag economics graduate from Kansas State University when he went to work for Kramer Seed Farms in southwestern Kansas near Hugoton in 2003. His arrival came just as the multigenerational family farm was about to embark on a series of changes that has radically altered its farming operation, and significantly boosted its financial well-being.

Mark Ricker switched from no-till to strip-till in 1995 and in the ensuing 22 years he has continually improved his yields, while at the same time, cut his fertilizer purchases by 40%.