Three more strip-till pioneers were inducted into the Strip-Till Farmer Hall of Fame at the 2025 National Strip-Tillage Conference over the summer: Mike Petersen (Greeley, Colo.), Cliff Roberts (Kentland, Ind.) and Harold Grall (Dumas, Texas). Each helped advance the practice in their own unique ways in the Northwest, Midwest and South respectively.
The Soil Scientist
Petersen, a former NRCS soil scientist and independent consultant with over 35 years of research experience, has “forgotten more about strip-till than most will ever know,” one of his longtime co-workers once told me.
Petersen first got involved with strip-till while working with the Colorado Conservation Tillage Assn. in 1987.
“We were trying to help farmers get more bang for their buck,” he recalls. “Back in 1987, we were trying to grow dryland corn at 25 bushels per acre. Now, farmers in Colorado are growing 110 bushels per acre with strip-till.”
What’s been the biggest game-changer for strip-till over the years? Petersen says it’s the science behind fertility placement.
“Broadcast fertilizer should be a thing of the past,” he says. “We should put the fertilizer in the ground where the plant’s going to find it. It doesn’t have eyes, hands or a nose. It must run to the fertilizer.”
The Numbers Guy
Grall, who holds an ag business and economics degree from West Texas State Univ., has kept meticulous records throughout his career, dating back to when he started farming on his own in 1994.
“Looking back, our move to 100% strip-till was one of the biggest factors in our production efficiency,” says Grall, who bought his first strip-till machine in 1997.
He converted his entire operation to strip-till by 2000. Today, he and his wife, Stacey, strip-till 8,600 acres, most of which are continuous corn acres under 26 center-pivot irrigation systems.
“We needed to change what we were doing if we were to be a sustainable grain operation in the semi-arid plains where irrigation water was becoming scarcer and rainfall is limited to about 12 inches per year,” he says. “We’d been looking at alternatives that would help us farm with our climate instead of fight it, and strip-till was the answer to several of our problems.”
The Experimenter
“I don’t recall when we wrote our first No-Till Farmer article on strip-till, but it was soon after Cliff Roberts used this no-till spin-off on his Kentland, Ind., farm in 1987,” says Frank Lessiter, founder and editor of No-Till Farmer and Strip-Till Farmer.
Nearly 30 years after that first visit to Roberts’ farm, Lessiter launched the first print edition of Strip-Till Farmer in 2017.
Roberts, who introduced farmers to strip-till at the inaugural National No-Tillage Conference in 1993, has been at the forefront of strip-till experimentation over the last several decades, constantly tinkering with equipment setups and fertilizer combinations. The key to strip-till, Roberts says, is fooling corn into thinking that it’s growing in a tillage environment.
“That’s what the strip is,” he says. “We’re working a strip just wide enough to run the no-till planter down through.”
It’s always fascinating learning about the origin stories of those who made such a huge impact on the advancement of strip-till. Who knows, there could be some future Hall of Famers featured in the articles on the following pages. If you know of someone who should be nominated for the honor, shoot me an email at [email protected].
