FARGO, N.D. – The term strip tillage hadn’t been coined in 1988 when Joe Breker and his older brother Eugene stumbled across the technique for their zero till farm at Havana, North Dakota.
The Brekers were some of the earliest pioneer no tillers in North America. Joe was one of the first presidents of the Manitoba-North Dakota Zero Till Farmers Association and has been active in zero till research ever since.
Eugene built a career focused on air drills, with Concord, Case and Amity. When the brothers decided to incorporate a limited tillage pass into their operation, they had already been 100 percent no till for nine years and were viewed as leaders in the no till movement.
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But the Brekers felt the modified tillage pass was something they had to do. Full, no-compromise no till had finally presented them with problems they had to solve, just as no till had given them solutions to previous problems.
Their tillage strips sent a few ripples through the close-knit community of dedicated no tillers in the United States and zero tillers in Canada.
By the late 1980s, the concept of never cultivating the soil had almost become a religion. Many of those early innovators felt cultivation was a practice that was close to immoral.
“No till is not a religion,” Eugene said.
“It’s just a way of doing something, that’s all. There are no hard and fast rules and it doesn’t matter what you call it as long as it works for you.”
By 1988, the Brekers had figured out that no till did not work for them when planting corn into small grain stubble. They were using a Concord with shanks fed by a cyclo drum. Sometimes it was OK, but usually it just didn’t work.
“Then Joe figured out that if he could make a black strip in the fall, we might be able to plant corn into that strip the next spring.
“So we got a DMI fertilizer bar and made some black strips in the wheat stubble and seeded into them the next spring. It worked great. It was very simple and it solved the problem.
“It didn’t seem like much because it wasn’t anything – just something we needed to do. At the time, it didn’t even have a name, like strip till or anything like that. It was just something we did.”
The next year, they travelled to the first annual No Till Conference in Indianapolis where they met other no tillers who had stumbled across the same solution to the same corn planting problem.
“We’re certainly not the first farmers to do something like this in the field. We all just did it on our own because that’s what we all needed to do to make things work on our farms.”
Breker said it wasn’t until years later that the practice was named strip till.
“You can call it strip till or modified no till or striped till. It doesn’t matter as long as it works for you.”
