Cover crops, livestock assist no-till

By Larry Dreiling

One of the tenets of no-till farm practices has always been to let the farm work for the producer, rather than have the producer work the farm.

Gabe Brown, Bismarck, N.D., is one of those producers who have decided to use what he calls the "biological horsepower" of no-till to take his farm to higher profitability.

Since taking up no-till in 1994, Brown has become recognized as a major booster of the practice to anyone who will listen to him, even a group as diverse as the Natural Resources Defense Council, which named him this year's recipient of a Growing Green Award. Brown spoke at the No-till on the Plains winter conference earlier this year, one of many events he's been invited to address.

Brown is primarily a "black and red hybrid" cow-calf producer, yet he uses cover crops in no-till on his 2,000-acre operation in order to improve the health of his soils to increase organic matter while enabling him to reduce his input costs, including a 90 percent reduction in fertilizer costs and a 50 percent cut in herbicide costs.

"It's about healthy profits from healthy soils. It seems like all we in farming ever do is write checks.

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