If there's one thing Buck Braswell enjoys about as much as raising grain and cotton crops with reduced tillage it's helping other farmers learn how to do it too.

“It's just farmer-to-farmer talk,” Braswell said during a presentation to the Conservation Tillage, Cotton and Rice Conference held recently in Houston.

“It's advice from the turnrow.”

Braswell has been involved to some degree with reduced tillage systems since he was in the 10th grade. That was back in Mississippi in 1963. He's farmed in the Lower Rio Grande Valley since 1988 and has been farming with minimal tillage systems there since 1991.

“If folks have iron in their blood and think they can't make a crop without breaking land, they probably don't need to be here,” he said. “We can do without so much tillage.”

He's done without a lot of steel interference on acreage ranging from 5,000 to 7,000 since 1993. “I've sold every breaking plow, every chisel and every disk I owned,” he said. “And crop yields on cotton and grain are just as good as any conventional tillage farm around me. If a farmer wants to he can make no-till work.”

Braswell says he and other farmers who might try reduced tillage will encounter “some problems along the way. But if I can help prevent some of those problems by explaining some of my mistakes, I'm happy to help. That's why I'm here.”

Braswell said the first thing a farmer interested in trying reduced tillage should do is a bit of paperwork. “Make two lists: Why you should try reduced tillage and why you shouldn't. There are plenty of people to talk to for information.”




“And this is just easier farming. I'm saving a lot of fuel and that's a big savings with current fuel prices.”

He figures he once put an average of 2,000 hours a year on his tractors. That's dropped to 400 to 500 hours now on smaller tractors.

“I got rid of all the four-wheel-drive tractors, and I think I'll be able to keep tractors longer than before. I only pull lightweight equipment.”

He's done some more math. He said before 1993, he averaged 1.4 hours per acre of land on his tractors. He's whittled that down to .6 hour per acre with reduced tillage.

And his fuel bill takes a smaller piece of his income, too. “In the early '90s we were using about 120,000 gallons of diesel, about 15.9 gallons per acre. In 2004, we used 16,150 gallons, about 2.78 gallons per acre.

“I don't go to the repair shop as often as I used to. I get to play golf and I don't have to work as hard. I had to get interested in other things.”


He says conventional tillage farms also have erosion problems. “A lot of the soil is blowing away,” he says. “We don't have problems with blowing sand.”


Braswell said a no-till novice needs some basic equipment to get started. The list includes:

  • A good spray rig
  • A hooded sprayer
  • A good planter



Braswell is currently involved in a fertility study, using GPS technology. He's the only one of four farmers using conservational tillage.



e-mail: rsmith@primediabusiness.com