Ohio's Country Journal has published a profile examining the soil health practices in use on the David Brandt Farm, the Carroll, Ohio operation long regarded as a reference point for US no-till and cover crop farming.

The Brandt farm occupies a singular position in American row-crop agriculture. Dave Brandt, who farmed the operation for decades until his death in 2023 following a tractor accident, built a national reputation by pairing continuous no-till with multi-species cover crop mixes on a commercial-scale grain farm. His field days drew thousands of farmers to Fairfield County, and his nickname — "the Obi-Wan Kenobi of soil health" — reflected how heavily other growers leaned on his trial-and-error results.

Ohio's Country Journal's report returns to the farm to document how the soil health system built there continues to operate. For growers weighing the economics of reduced tillage and cover cropping, the Brandt operation has always functioned as a working answer to a question that trial plots answer slowly: does a soil health system hold up across decades, across rented and owned ground, and across weather years?

Why the Brandt farm matters to field decisions

The operation's significance lies in its longevity and its transparency. Brandt began no-tilling in 1971 and started experimenting with cover crops in 1978, giving the farm one of the longest continuous runs of combined no-till and cover crop management in the Corn Belt. That timeline matters because soil health benefits — aggregate stability, water infiltration, reduced input dependency — compound over years, and few farms can show results at the 40- and 50-year mark.

The practices associated with the farm became a template that USDA, soil health coalitions and seed companies cited when promoting cover crop adoption. They include:

• Continuous no-till across the rotation
• Multi-species cover crop blends, often combining grasses, legumes and brassicas
• Integrating livestock to graze cover crops where feasible
• Cutting synthetic nitrogen rates as soil biology recovered

What the profile covers

The Ohio's Country Journal article walks through the practices as they stand on the farm today, offering readers a look at how the system is managed following Dave Brandt's passing and the transition to the next generation of the family's stewardship.

For arable farmers, profiles of this kind carry practical weight. They show machinery choices, seeding timings and species selection as actually practised, not as modelled. They also show failure modes — cover crops that failed to establish, mixes that cost more than they returned, and the correction cycles that followed.

What farmers should watch next

Readers wanting the full detail — species mixes, management timings and the current direction of the operation — can find the complete profile in Ohio's Country Journal. The relevant question for UK and European growers is how the farm's long-run results translate to different climates and subsidy regimes, and forthcoming soil health trial data from institutions tracking multi-decade no-till sites will be the next evidence to watch.