PIP COURTNEY, PRESENTER: There was a time not so very long ago that farmers spent almost as much time ploughing paddocks as growing anything and harvesting it. It was the neat punctuation mark between crops. But when pioneers like Rob Ruwoldt gave cultivation a miss and left the stubble to enrich and stabilise his soil, they were branded ratbags. Well, it seems their time has come and the champion of no till cropping is now the toast of the farming fraternity. He took time out from bringing in another bin buster to tell Prue Adams about that journey from ridicule to respectability.

ROB RUWOLDT, FARMER OF THE YEAR 2011: I've written a lot of stuff in my time and one of the things I wrote down in an article was, "Change won't happen until the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change."

PRUE ADAMS, REPORTER: Change could be Rob Ruwoldt's middle name. Every summer he brings in the crop, but every year is a little different from the last. For three decades now he's been at the cutting edge of an evolving set of cropping practices that spread the length and breadth of agricultural Australia.

ROB RUWOLDT: I started very early with my motivation I think because poverty made me do that, you know. And it drove me to do what we've done.

PRUE ADAMS: The Ruwoldt clan hailed from Germany and took up land in the 1880s near Horsham in Victoria's Wimmera. Hard work kept them farming through the Great Depression, the '40s and '50s and the green revolution of the '70s. The practices they employed were commonplace. Three-yearly crop rotations; a serial one year, pasture for sheep the next and then left fallow. But 30-odd years ago they started ramping up the intensity.

ROB RUWOLDT: In the '80s continuous cropping started coming in with the legumes, the peas, the things that we started to grow, and so you wouldn't put the peas on the fallow; you think, "Well, we're just gonna try these so you put them on a wheat stubble." So you'd burn your wheat stubble and you'd bring that cultivation practices with you. And so then we had two years of destruction of soil to try and grow a crop, and then, "OK, then we'll grow another crop, so we'll get rid of the pre-stubble and we'll cultivate again." So, it was gonna be really detrimental to the soil quality.

PRUE ADAMS: In the '80s when these family videos were filmed, direct drilling, sowing the seeds into last season's stubble, was almost unheard of. For Rob Ruwoldt, it was the first step on the road to no till farming.

ROB RUWOLDT: It was pretty much just led by a dream and we didn't know where it was gonna go, we didn't know what to do. So we just had to keep playing around and try and work the system out.

NORM RUWOLDT, RETIRED FARMER: Well I was all for it because I realised that the paddocks weren't growing the crops that they should. And you'd burn the stubble and you'd get a big wind and it'd blow like mad. And then some farmers around, they said, "Oh, the better she blows, the better she grows."

PRUE ADAMS: Unlike many in their generation, Norm and Rose Ruwoldt were prepared to back their son as he flouted convention.

ROB RUWOLDT: We've come a long way since '83 when we started this little journey, haven't we dad?

NORM RUWOLDT: Yes, well the big change as far as I was concerned, which I thought might be a bit of a mistake when you brought the deseeder out. But, I've been proved wrong.

There was neighbours there just said, "Oh, ya can't farm like that." And I was still out there working on the farm then. And then I had bits of arguments with people around who saying, "Well you'll never change me. I'll make fallow as long as I live." And he's a fella about my age and he's still the same. (Laughs). And arguing with him one day, and he says, "Oh, that's all right." I said, "You just keep farming away. You're happy." And I says, "Wouldn't want everybody to do this; there'd be too much grain around."

ROB RUWOLDT: And he said to me one morning, "I hope this works because I can get a pension soon and you can't." So, you know, pretty much meaning, "You blow it, you know, it's all over."

PRUE ADAMS: No till farming is all about building up soil structure and that means retaining the residue of previous year's crops.

ROB RUWOLDT: Yeah, stubble's king. I mean, it's food for our biology underground and it protects us all from the elements of - the nature of the weather. And we've got four years of residue here. We've got our canola stubble from this year obviously. We've got bean stubble here from last year.

PRUE ADAMS: So it's fava beans.

ROB RUWOLDT: Fava beans. And then there's wheat stubble from the year before. And if we look hard enough, we'll probably find some lentil stubble here from the year before that. So we got four years of stubble there and we don't graze or anything so it just stays there and rots down and basically turns into soil eventually. Carbon.

When we were kids and with conventional farming practices, you only ever found the earth worms in mum's veggie patch. But now we go out in the field and we find earth worms absolutely everywhere.

PRUE ADAMS: So are you a biological farmer?

ROB RUWOLDT: No. No, I'm not a biological farmer, but I believe in natural biology, and to get natural biology to prosper we need to look after it. We have to create the environment for it to prosper.

PRUE ADAMS: This is not biological or organic farming because herbicides and even pesticides are used when needed. One thing this forward thinking farmer won't do though is crush the soil needlessly below the wheels of giant machinery. As we sat in the header just before Christmas bringing in the barley crop, there were obvious tramlines for the harvester to follow.

ROB RUWOLDT: Controlled traffic is having confined traffic lanes and ours is set up on 120 inches, or a bit over three metres, and so all the machines drive on that.

PRUE ADAMS: So you don't - you'd never drive anywhere else. That's the rule - golden rule.

ROB RUWOLDT: Golden rule: never drive anywhere else. You know, there might be an odd exception, but you hate doing it and it's only usually a once off. So, very much confined to those traffic lanes.

PRUE ADAMS: No till devotees credit controlled traffic with keeping the soil friable, uncompacted and moist. For four years Rob Ruwoldt and his agronomist Andrew Newell have been logging data from moisture probes in the paddocks. What they're finding is that while conventional growers have compaction zones, preventing plants from accessing underground water, it's a different story here.

ROB RUWOLDT: So what we found is that we were accessing moisture down below a metre.

VANESSA GRIEGER, VIC. NO-TILL FARMERS ASSOC.: Rob, I guess you could say he's the champion of no till in Victoria.

PRUE ADAMS: Vanessa Grieger has been running the Victorian chapter of the No-Till Farmers Association for the past six years. It's an organisation that was set up by Rob Ruwoldt and a bunch of like-minded mates five years earlier.

ROB RUWOLDT: In the end, the pressure got too great in 2002 with the drought and the dust storms and I just said, "We've just gotta start this group." So, half a dozen of us got our heads together and started Victorian No-Till Farmers Association.

PRUE ADAMS: While the group has grown from a handful of members to over 500, the philosophy it espouses has met with some formidable opposition.

VANESSA GRIEGER: There was a lot of older farmers that said, "You're mad. It's never gonna to work. We've tried it; it didn't work." But Rob persisted and he's actually made it work. It even got to the point where some farmers who were dead against it actually called us a little religious group.

PRUE ADAMS: The group organises farm tours and advises on updated no till practices.

VANESSA GRIEGER: The first year is always difficult because they don't have their soil biology working as it should, so even the second year, it's a little bit more difficult. So we try to say to them, "Look, hang in there for three years. You can't give it a try for one year and expect great results. So, keep working at it for three years. Once you get past three years and into five years, you'll - all of a sudden you'll see all of the benefits just start to happen."

PRUE ADAMS: After the first few stabilising years, the system can be adapted.

VANESSA GRIEGER: After a couple of years, they start to refine their system and implement some of the other tools that they've got out there such as inter-row sowing and controlled traffic. They'll go down that path just to make the system work a little bit better. Rob would be at the forefront of that. If someone wants to know what direction no till was going, they will be looking at what Rob's been doing, because he's out there for 25 years or so into the no till farming.

PRUE ADAMS: One direction Rob Ruwoldt is going in is precision seeding. At the forefront of GPS technology, he's already increased the row widths and helped design a disc seeder to suit no till practices. Now he wants to deposit fewer seeds to get bigger, healthier canola plants.

ROB RUWOLDT: Canola loves a bit of space to grow, so it grows out and grows lots of branches instead of having one or two little stems, it gets a tree-like approach and we get more grain off those plants.

PRUE ADAMS: I suppose what most farmers would want to know is is your yield greater per hectare than the average farmer's yield, or is it more about the fact that you can harvest at all at times when others can't?

ROB RUWOLDT: Well, we're certainly growing some very high-yielding crops now. I won't say in the good years we'll yield better than anybody else, but in the dry years we certainly do. Yeah, we have very much, to a great degree, drought-proofed our farm.

PRUE ADAMS: It's the dry years when farmers make money. There's not so much grain around, so the prices are often good. But Rob also stores thousands of tonnes of product on farm so he can hold out for a price he's willing to sell at.

CHRIS DRUM, WIMMERA FARMER: To be honest, we are extremely fortunate to have Rob in the district and, you know, I sorta compare it to pioneers of old. When they struck gold, they'd keep it to themselves. They wouldn't tell anyone. And, you know, Rob struck gold many years ago.

PRUE ADAMS: Chris Drum and Wayne Robbins spent a long time looking over their neighbour's fence before finally deciding to go no till a few years back.

WAYNE ROBBINS, WIMMERA FARMER: Rob's only ever been a phone call away. He's very obliging. If you've got a question, sorta he'll answer it. He'll expect you take it on board and implement it. But the creatures we are, it doesn't happen just like that. And, yeah, you tell him you've done it a different way, but then you change back to different row spacing or back to 15 inch row spacings and he'll always just say, "Oh, I bloody told ya so."

CHRIS DRUM: As time goes on you can see soil changes and then all of a sudden you become interested and you start learning about your soils and you start seeing the benefits of having healthy soils and, look, it makes it - a few droughts thrown in I suppose proves to you that you're on the right tram.

WAYNE ROBBINS: You've never finished in setting the system up. Yeah, it's - we're 18, 20 years behind Rob sorta - but, yeah, we're improving every year.

PRUE ADAMS: Last September, this Victorian grain grower was recognised for his contribution to Australian farming.

ROB RUWOLDT: Big surprise. It's very humbling to think that your peers think so highly of you.

NORM RUWOLDT: Oh, proud.

PRUE ADAMS: Yeah. I suppose that's lovely after all those years of farming yourself and having your family farm.

NORM RUWOLDT: (Getting emotional and pointing to chest) Emotional.

PRUE ADAMS: It's not always easy cutting a path.

ROB RUWOLDT: We don't know where we're gonna next, but ...

WIFE: You will find somewhere to go. You always do!

ROB RUWOLDT: We will find somewhere to ...

PRUE ADAMS: But it's paid off in many ways. Rob Ruwoldt travels the world teaching foreign farmers how to grow crops the no till way.

He has a unique relationship with the John Deere company too. On a lead users' group he gets to trial new gizmos so the giant farm machinery firm can implement changes to future equipment. But in the next few years, Rob Ruwoldt intends to step down from the driver's seat and let his own 26-year-old son Justin take the wheel.

ROB RUWOLDT: And even now with my son start saying, "I wanna do this, I wanna do that", I mean, I look at him going, "Oh, hang on, it's been working, ya know. Why have we gotta change?" But, I've gotta then look at myself and say, "Well, hang on, that was me 25 years ago." And I constantly do that: I look back and think, "No, no, alright, we can try this." Even if I know it's not gonna work, that's fine. They've gotta learn themselves and you gotta give them the rope, because who knows?, there might be a better way. They might have a better idea.