Spotlight Series

When Mike Conner was growing up on his family farm in Otterbein, Indiana, something about spring didn’t seem right. “I remember seeing snow piled up in the roadside ditches, and it’d be black,” Mike says, recalling tillage practices that would darken the snow with displaced soil. “I’d watch soil being blown away, and there was always something about that that bothered me—like it was a part of me being blown away too. I thought, there’s gotta be a better way.”

When Mike, a third-generation farmer, graduated college, he didn’t return to the farm straight away. Instead, he took a position as a teacher, coaching basketball and teaching science in an Indiana junior high school. Eventually, though, he felt the call to return back home and help his dad, growing corn and soybeans on their over 1,000 acre farm.

But Mike hadn’t forgotten his childhood observations about soil displacement, and began to educate himself about no-till practices. At first, his dad wasn’t convinced—but little by little, Mike introduced the practices in their corn fields and began to see great results, gradually switching over their management techniques and experimenting with cover crops on more and more fields. “After my dad passed away, it was time to do what I really wanted to do: no-till,” explains Mike. “I’ve been 100% no-till for 25 years, and I wouldn’t want to do it any other way.”