The 25th annual National No-Tillage Conference in St. Louis in January will include more than 40 presenters and celebrate decades of no-till innovation.
The conference program is available at www.NoTillConference.com and provides a glimpse into the more than 40 presentations offering the most innovative, leading-edge information growers can absorb from Jan. 10-13, 2017.
Sharing the best no-till management practices and ideas to improve every no-tiller’s bottom line, speakers include seasoned no-tillers, agronomists, soil scientists, no-till consultants and precision farming experts from the U.S., Canada and as far as South Africa, covering everything from soil health to planter setups to cover cropping to fertility strategies.
The event will include 13 general session presentations, 24 classrooms and 70 roundtable discussions. Following is a sample of speakers lined up to present nearly 100 hours of in-depth no-till learning at the Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark hotel in downtown St. Louis.
The conference opens the afternoon of Tuesday, Jan. 10 with two big events: an in-depth private workshop with soil microbiologist Wendy Taheri of TerraNimbus covering arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi; and a special seminar for both farm equipment dealers and growers with Greg “Machinery Pete” Peterson, as he provides his expert analysis and perspectives on the value and market for used no-till planters and other equipment. All this will be followed by a special welcome reception for conference attendees sponsored by Farmers Edge, Harvest International, Midwest Bio-Tech and Montag Mfg.
Officially kicking off the conference Wednesday morning, no-till farmer John Young of Herndon, Ky.—whose father started the no-till revolution in 1962 with the first commercial no-tilled plot—and John’s son Alexander, will share the newly recognized advantages of no-till, some observations about what has changed in no-tilling the last 55 years, and explain why the “Four Ps—Profit, Production, Progeny and Posterity”—are so important. In “Successful Past, Bright Future with No-Till and Cover Crops,” no-tiller Ray McCormick of Vincennes, Ind., will discuss how his operation progressed to continuous no-tilling of 2,400 acres of corn and soybeans and management of 2,000 acres of woodlands and wetlands on his farm. McCormick will also reflect on what’s changed on his no-till operation in the last quarter century.
The full schedule of the 25th annual National No-Tillage Conference can be viewed below. A registration form can be downloaded here.