What to do When Soil Health Practices Don’t Work

By: Courtney Leeper Girgis

Adam Grady was not a stranger to no-till and cover crops when he met consultant Allen Williams in the spring of 2016. He was skeptical, however. Grady, whose family has farmed on the coastal plains of eastern North Carolina since the late 1700s, had seen his father, Clegg Grady, turn to no-till in the mid-1980s. Tobacco was their king crop, with corn, soybeans, wheat, oats, and milo added in 1999.

By 2005, Grady was no longer seeing benefits from no-till and switched to strip-till. In 2010, he started planting a cover crop of wheat or rye behind tobacco and before a rotation of corn or soybeans.