Beyond the stand of trees hedging Jane Green’s childhood home lay an irrigation runoff pond. Growing up, when she needed space to think, she wandered out to sit on its grassy banks and ponder life.

As kids, she and her siblings played in the pond and even attempted to ice skate on it. As she grew older, she found another place to retreat. Out in the cornfield, she would climb onto the center pivot, find a comfortable perch, and look out across the land. On humid summer evenings, the cold irrigation pipe felt wonderful against her hot skin.

Leland Poppe grew up on a farm near Grant, Nebraska. He still remembers the farmer who first introduced him to no-till. “Our farming practices were tilling the ground, making sure it looked perfect, and not a weed on the place,” Leland remembered. “If one popped up, you would go till it again.”

No-till looked different from the farming Leland knew, but the farmer told him, “Five years and you could finally see the impact.” Leland gave it time. Eventually, he was asking his dad and customers, “Hey, have you thought about no-till?”

Julie Stahly grabbed a bag of home-ground wheat flour. It couldn’t get much fresher than this: wheat grains straight from her farm to the mill in her kitchen.

The bag bore a new name: Homestead Grains. This was it. The first store. Julie strode toward the doors of Hills Family Foods in Imperial, Nebraska. Soon she would have the answer to her question: Would there be space on the store's shelves, and would customers make room in their carts for her locally grown flour?

As rising input costs and falling commodity prices challenge producers across southwest Nebraska, Julie Stahly keeps searching for better answers, convinced the next experiment may uncover something that could also help other producers.