 My name is David Kruger, my wife is Nancy Kruger, and my daughters Maggie and Katie. We live 10 miles west of Melbourne, South Dakota, on the edge of the Cato Hills. One of the things I always remembered with my grandpa growing up when I was real little, we have a lot of southwest wind that comes down the hills. One of our biggest issues was always the dirt blowing, and I remember as a kid, my grandpa going out with a loader into the ditch along Highway 12 and scooping dirt out of the ditch and hauling it back out into the fields. When I started no tilling, I remember my grandpa walking around watching me like the first three to four years, just kind of shaking his head like, I don't know if he knows what he's doing. And after about the fourth year, I can remember the spot in the field where he were, where I got out of the tractor to do something and he looked at me and he says, if you can keep doing this and getting those kind of yields, you might be on to something. When I went to Lake Area Votek, one of the teachers, Jim Glendenin, had introduced the concept of no till to me. At that time, there was no thought in my mind about building soil or improving soil health. It was basically to keep the rocks in the ground and hopefully save a little bit of moisture. And so I kind of fell into the no till practices that way, later realizing a lot of the other benefits that hadn't really crossed my mind when we started it. The transition to no till started in 1993, I believe. I rented a no till drill. It was probably 29 acres. I continued to transition fields to no till over the next seven or eight years, just kind of gradually adding another piece and another piece. So my longest field has been no tilled since 1993. Most all of my other fields now have been no tilled for roughly 18 years, probably. Most of my fields have from 40 to 60 feet of drop per mile. So we have a lot of slope. But our biggest challenge is water pushing from underneath, sub-irrigated. So we have a very varying soil type, and it will change in three to five feet. You'll go from a hard, wet clay to a pure sand. And one of the things that no till has done that I feel is improved is taking those sandy spots and by improving some organic matter in it, it's really improved its ability to sustain itself in a dry period. Some places the seed slot would close really easy, and then you'd go 50 feet, and you just could not close a seed slot. And so I tried numerous closing wheels before I found one that I felt worked fair in every soil type. So you have to continually look at different options and continually try different things. It basically took me 10 years, I would say, to get to where I'm comfortable. I'm not worried about having too much residue, I'm not worried about it being wet. I've planted in really dry years, I've planted in really wet years, and I've made my mistakes in those years. And when I see that happen again the second time, I can, okay, I did this another time, and I know how to make it work better the second time through the third time through. So I think that no till has given me different opportunities, and one of the opportunities that I've really seen is if you look at a picture of my farm and the land I farm, I farm an area of 11 quarters all right around my place. Neighbors after watching me 10 to 15 years of what I'm doing have come to me and said, hey, we like what you're doing on your ground, we want you to farm ours too, the same way. One of the biggest things we see happening in agriculture is the loss of our soil, and the loss of our soil is not something that we can replace. Once the soil erodes, washes down the creek, it's gone, and once you lose your top soil, your ability to produce crops is not there anymore. And so one of the biggest things that we are trying to do with the no till is to preserve our soil so that we can continue to produce crops down the road for our future generations.