Opinion: I’m trying to heal 100 years of tillage. Don’t pull the support that makes it possible.

By Douglas Poole

When I came back to my family’s dryland farm near Mansfield, Washington, after 20 years away, the land told me something had to change.

My grandfather and father had worked this ground for over 70 years, and the soil showed it. In places, erosion had taken it down to bare bedrock. The more we tilled, the more it blew away. This was no indictment of how my family farmed – my dad is one of the best farmers I know. He always believed there was a better way; the resources just hadn’t presented themselves to him.

That was my third attempt at making this farm work, and I was determined it would be the last. So I started over from the ground up, with a simple premise: The soil is alive, and my job is to treat it that way. Read the rest of the article here.