Jodi DeJong-Hughes

I started in 1996 at the University of Minnesota and not many people know that I’m not a farm kid. I came straight out of college with a master’s degree. I knew everything and then I realized I knew nothing.

We’d be doing research on strip-till, and I’d be with a farmer in the combine. That’s where I learned everything. Because when you’re in the combine, you don’t really censor what you’re saying. You tell it like it is. But if I asked you 3 days later how it was, you’d be like, “Yeah, it was good.” It’s not always good. We’ve had ups and downs with strip-till, and there’s a huge learning curve with strip-till.

In January 2025, we’ll have our 20th annual Soil Management Summit. We’ve also hosted 7 strip-till expos, where we’d bring in up to 11 pieces of strip-till equipment to run side-by-side. The reason I say these things is because I could not do this alone. No way.

Since there was nobody at the university focusing on tillage when I started, and I’m not a farm kid, I had to learn from you guys. Thank you to all the companies that brought equipment to our events and all the farmers for the advice you’ve given me along the way. People always tell me, “Oh, you’re so excited.” Well, yeah, who couldn’t be excited about soils, right? If you’re not, come talk to me.

David Legvold

Strip-till is a journey. No-till is a journey. My journey started when I rented a no-till drill from Dakota County SWCD. I went to plant a field of soybeans, and my dad was sitting in the car watching. A thunderstorm happened to come up and I had about a half-acre left, which I was going to finish.

When we got home, the tractor was full of mud, the drill was full of mud, and I was full of mud. As I walked up to the house with my dad, he said, “You know Dave, that no-till isn’t for “Shi…nola.”

In the fall, after running the combine, Dad said, “Man, there were a lot of beans in that field. You know that no-till, that’s the way to go, Dave.” With the support of my family and with the indulgence of my dear wife putting up with this stuff, and now with our 2 sons living nearby, I feel very, very fortunate.

It’s not about me, it’s about the people that have surrounded me and have spurred me and informed me and given me encouragement along the way. I want to thank the colleges that I’ve been blessed to work with. They send their bright students to do research, and they find stuff and tell me about things that I never thought about before.

Bill Preller

Like many farmers, we moldboard plowed in the early 1970s. What happened to the farm bottom ground? It flooded on a regular basis in the spring. One year, my dad said, “Never again,” with a steel resolve. He went to the John Deere dealer and said, “We want to buy a no-till planter.” Literally, the guy laughed. We ended up buying an Allis no-till planter out of Southern Illinois, and we planted our first no-till crop, cold turkey in 1973. Just to prove how weird we were, in 1974, we no-tilled into tractor-tall rye.

It was a complete failure. You know why? That happened to be a dry spring, sucked all the water out. We had a horrible stand and thank goodness we chopped it, so we didn’t know how much grain yield we didn’t have.

My dad would not have made that decision in 1973 to go cold turkey no-till without the information sitting on the kitchen table and his desk that was No-Till Farmer magazine. That was the source of information. That was it. But it gave him enough confidence that there were other weirdos out there, that he did it.

Growing up on a cow farm, my first love was cattle. But that whole experience in 1973 was when I fell in love with growing corn. If it hadn’t been for Frank Lessiter and No-Till Farmer, I would not be standing here today because I never would’ve had that opportunity to truly understand growing corn.