Healthy Soil and Profits from Low-Till

Wisdom from 34-year NT veteran

Paul Jasa, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension engineer, is as practical and scientific as they come. His advice: “The key is that the resources (labor, fuel, equipment, etc.) producers formerly spent on tillage can now be spent on planting, spraying, fertilizing and harvesting more crops. Some who’ve switched to no-till have let hired help go and/or sold off large tractors because they don’t need them anymore for tillage. Others can now farm many more acres with the existing help and tractors, (either running two shifts with one tractor and planter or adding a second planter on the tractor that used to pull the tillage equipment). As they broaden and diversify the crop rotation, they add even more acres as the planting and harvesting windows get much larger. Thus, equipment inventory goes down, the fixed costs get spread across more acres, and the tillage costs are gone.