Isn't that about as practical as a carpenter who won't hammer or a firefighter who won't climb ladders?

Not these days.

Frey, a pig farmer in Pequea Township who grows corn, soybeans, wheat and barley on 700 acres, hasn't plowed a field in more than 20 years. Wouldn't consider it.

Frey gave up the plow and converted to no-till farming in the 1980s after a downpour raked his land.

Runoff gouged deep fissures into a slope of exposed soil he had labored to prepare for seeding.

"That was the point," Frey recalled the other day, "where I thought, 'I need to do something better than what I've been doing.'"

He turned to no-till, a cultivation system in which a crop is planted into a cover crop or a field littered with the debris of the previous harvest, eliminating the need for plowing and seedbed preparation.

Frey crouched in a recently harvested cornfield to show me the soil-conservation advantage of no-till.

Ten inches of rain had fallen on his farm during the weekend, far too much for even a parched field to completely absorb.

But as Frey's fields shed the excess water, the flow was slowed by a carpet of corn harvest residue -- tangled leaves, broken stalks, crushed cobs -- that covers his land.

"Here we lost a little bit of soil," said Frey, pointing amid the ground clutter to a barely discernible channel where storm water had flowed, "but it's minimal because all of the residue acted like a dam."

"Here it broke through the dam," he said, pointing to a spot where the tiny channel had started to form.

Pointing at sodden debris bowed by the water's pressure, he said, "Here it didn't break through."

Frey said that during the latest soaking clear water drained off his fields, in stark contrast to streams turned the color of chocolate by erosion upstream.

Tons of silt, manure and chemicals get swept into Lancaster County's waterways after every downpour. In time, pollution from the runoff makes its way to the Chesapeake, helping to create low-oxygen dead zones where no marine life survives.

Saving the bay is reason enough for Frey not to plow. But no-till has other benefits as well, particularly for soil.

Consider this: The use of plows and harrow disks to open up the ground, flip it over and pulverize it into small pieces is not an especially friendly thing to do to soil and to the earthworms, fungi and microbes that enrich it.

In contrast, the undisturbed soil of a no-till field, especially when it's covered with mellowing organic debris, plays host to a thriving biological community. And there's nothing like worm burrows for funneling rainwater into deeper layers of soil.

Another advantage of no-till is that the ground cover shields the soil from sun and wind, deterring the loss of moisture.

A drawback to covered soil, however, is it stays cool in spring, hindering germination.

No-till planter equipment offers a solution to that problem. On Frey's 12-row planter, for example, double disks with stubby fingers clear a six-inch path for each row before seeds are dropped into the earth and covered.

Experts say no-till done properly results in crop yields as good as what conventional cultivation produces. Yields on no-till fields may even be higher when rainfall is sparse.

"Economics will drive" acceptance of no-till, said Brad Michael, a soil conservationist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Michael estimates no-till is practiced on 10 to 15 percent of Lancaster County's cropland, and he expects the percentage to rise in conjunction with higher fuel costs.

The bottom line is no-till farmers use less fuel because they don't plow and they don't disk. They just plant.

Frey estimates he uses a third less fuel than a conventional farmer. He thinks farmers are taking notice.

"We try and tout the advantages of soil conservation," Frey said, "but it's fuel prices making people think."

E-mail Jeff at jhawkes@lnpnews.com