MILLERSBURG, Ind. — For Dean Rink, conservation farming is common sense: It’s good for the land, and it can be good for a farmer’s bottom line.

Dean and Kate Rink were recently honored by the Elkhart County Soil and Water Conservation District as Conservation Farmers of the Year. In addition, the Rinks received one of the Indiana Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts’ Conservation Farmer of the Year awards for 2007.

Dean said he and his son together farm about 800 acres. Dean’s been farming all his life and bought his first farm in 1974.

“And I’d farmed kind of a conventional-tillage type operation until the late ’80s,” Dean said. “In 1988, I just started no-tilling soybeans and then a couple years later I started no-tilling corn, and I felt it was mostly economics. Because it cost money to plow and disc and tillage.

“My dad had died in ’86, and so I was hiring labor and I thought, ‘Well, if I no-till, it’s not going to require as much labor, not as much time, not as much fuel.’”

Weeds are a challenge with no-till, Dean noted.

“So if you’re going to no-till, you have to use usually more and different chemicals in order to kill the weeds,” he said.

From 1988 on, Dean gradually got into more and more no-tilling, corn and beans and occasionally wheat — “although wheat’s not really friendly to the no-till idea,” he said.

No-tilling is just one aspect of soil conservation.

Dean said that in the late ’90s, he had some waterways “that were completely out of condition. The waterway had filled full of dirt, so it needed to be reconstructed.”

A program is available to offset the cost of waterway work and erosion control, and Dean utilized it. Most recently, he’s installed filter strips, which is grass seeded along ditch banks.

“That prevents not only soil erosion from running from the field into the ditch, it filters any chemicals that are sprayed on the crop so that it doesn’t get into the ditch,” he said.

Financial assistance for projects like the ones the Rinks have done is available through the Farm Service Agency and the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

“It just seemed like common sense to save a resource, and soil is a resource for crops,” Dean said. “Crops have to have soil to grow, and we don’t want to see it running down the ditch. So anything we can do to keep the soil in the field is a good thing. The grassed waterways and the filter strips and no-tillage are good practices that save the soil and make for better crops.

“It’s still a challenge to make the crops grow under those conditions, but it can be done and it can be done in a good way.”

The SWCD honors farmers who do conservation practices, though Dean said, “I would have done this whether I was going to be recognized or not.”

“I don’t need to be recognized for anything,” he said. “I just do what I do because I feel it’s important to do it that way.”

The state SWCD association honored the Rinks, along with other Hoosiers who stood out with their conservation measures, at a banquet in Indianapolis.

“I thought it was really nead to sit in a room with 600 people and there were so many there who had the ultimate goal to conserve the land, to be good stewards of the land,” Kate said. “I guess for me that was the crowning moment, to see that happen,” not the individual recognition.

Kate practices some of the same conservation techniques with her flowers.

“She plants thousands of flowers, and she knows not to plant the flowers on a steep slope and to be sure to conserve the soil for her flowers,” Dean said.

“I pretty much am organic when it comes to my garden — try to be — so that I’m not putting a lot of chemicals on the food we eat,” Kate said.

One technique Kate pointed out is planting things that are natural inhibitors to bugs “and confuse them so that they don’t attack the things they want to go after. Often times you plant herbs and flowers under vegetables so that it confuses them and (bugs) don’t attack your vegetables.”

Kate works at Prairie Trail Farm, where she said she’s learned techniques from Renee Troyer-Campbell.

“They’re just wonderful people,” Nancy Brown, program manager with Elkhart County SWCD, said of the Rinks. “They’re very conservation-conscious.”