Pacific NW Farmers

 Why has no-till farming taken so long to catch on in the Pacific NW? Hans Kok, an Extension Specialist for Conservation Tillage explains. “That is the challenge and that has been a challenge for the Pacific Northwest in areas like Tennessee we’ve had no-till happening since the 1950’s and 1960’s. In the Plains no-till was adopted in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, and the Pacific NW has had a problem with trying to plant in a hundred bushel wheat stubble and get a new crop up well.  The big equipment manufacturers never made any equipment for the Pacific NW that worked very well because we’re just too small a market for those guys to bother about building gear. So it took until some local farmers started building gear for our area that the system started working. That started in the 1980’s with Mort Swanson coming out with a drill called the Yielder drill. That machine was able to go through massive amounts of residue and actually get a crop planted without any tillage between crops. That machine was first generation, it had all sorts of issues but there are still farmers out ther today that are still using those yielder drills. Over the years we’ve gotten better drills, more manufacturers jumping in there, and now we have hoe drills and double disk drills that can fairly easily put a crop into heavy residue and get a successful crop-stand on top of that old residue without doing much tillage or any tillage at all.”