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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

> I vaguely remember reading about some pioneer in the field developing
> -- I think it was in the 1930s -- a method of no-chemical no-till
> farming.

Marie, surely you are much too young to remember that far back!

Perhaps you are thinking of Edward Faulkner, who published Plowman's 
Folly in 1943. Before Faulkner, F.H. King published Farmers of Forty 
Centuries, which included information on how the Chinese used no-till methods.

When my father and I were farming in the fifties we plowed but used 
very few purchased products beyond lime. Just couldn't afford the 
chemical fertilizers being pushed.

"You ask me to plough the ground. Shall I take a knife and tear my 
mother's bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to 
rest. You ask me to dig for stones! Shall I dig under her skin for 
bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again. You 
ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it and be rich like white 
men. But how dare I cut my mother's hair? "

--Nevada Chief Smohalla's reply to agricultural directives from Washington