How much tilling should be done?

As users of the Earth, we get mixed messages on how much manipulation of our soil we should be doing. Grandpop would put the three-bottom plow on the back of the John Deere 70 and have a go at it every spring, turning over what was on top and then planting over it.
I did the same thing for years. Then I started to use a six-prong subsoiler and disc harrow. Then it was just a disc harrow and a field conditioner. Now it's just a rototiller. Talk about extremes and the learning curve!
I just finished an article in the March/April issue of Hobby Farms that talked about the tools that one would use on a small parcel of land to get ready for the planting season.
First, I must comment that most people (myself included) would be incarcerated if we treated our bodies like we treat the soil! Ripping and tearing and going over the same area over and over again. Imagine doing that to a living organism. It's chances of survival would lessen each time that we did it. Your soil is the same way. It is a living organism! Yet, we exhibit this kind of behavior through ignorance. So before doing anything, understand what you are doing. Growing food is not just planting something and watching it grow.
I love my father dearly but if it wasn't for this article, "Till the Sun Comes Home", I don't know what I was going to to do. I would just about scream every time I saw him jump on the tractor the last two years and go out with the new rototiller we bought. He was caught up in the moment of a new piece of tillage equipment that was doing a great job in his eyes.
Dad and I were talking the other night and he mentioned that he read the article in his issue and said, "I guess I better back off with the rototiller." Ya, think? Of course, I had been making overtones to that effect but the old adage about believing it when someone else says it certainly proved prophetic here.
In the article, Dr. Harold Van Es, a professor of crop and soil sciences at Cornell, says something that I really grabbed ahold of. "Every time you till, you remove a little money from the account. Eventually your checking account will need to be balanced. Same goes for your soil. That doesn't mean you can't till, but you need to balance tillage with adding organic matter, such as compost, planting a cover crop or rotating with perennial crops to build up the soil.
"The more you disturb the soil, the more you break up the natural aggregates and the more you mineralize or lose organic matter and tilth. While not initially apparent, several years of excess tillage will show soil degradation."
Then there were these pearls of wisdom from Joel Dufour, owner of Earth Tools in Owenton, KY. He said, "Over-tilled, beat-up soils may feel good to the hand, but you've destroyed the capillary action, annihilated the earthworms and damaged the microbiological soil life."
That's some great food for thought. Every time I read stuff like this, I go out to the farm with new respect for my land and how I am going to treat it.