Till, No-Till, What is it!?
- Jeff LeGro
- Mar 27
- 3 min read
For thousands of years most farmers following European traditions have turned over the soil before planting annual crops. Improvements to the plow allowed greater "productivity" of a given piece of land. But this productivity, the greater yields that plowing seemed to produce, came at a number of costs. First is erosion: from ancient Greece to the American dustbowl, bare soil washes or blows away. Our topsoils are still declining in depth. Second, when we plow, we kill off much of the life in the soil. Variations on ecological farming: regenerative, biological, organic, natural, are rightfully getting a lot of attention right now, at least in what I think of as the New Farming circles. But even the extension agents, at least in NY & IL are willing to mention the importance of soil biology.
When mechanization, and then chemical fertilizers and so forth, completed the industrialization of our food production systems, the diversity of life in the soil (and above ground too) declined further creating an unsustainable cycle of dependence on synthetic inputs.
Our intention on Spring Wind Farm is healing and purification, for ourselves and all beings. Our first precept says to abstain from doing harm, but to cherish all life. By not tilling the soil or limiting tillage, we protect those lives. What lives are those you might ask? Many bacteria and plants have interdependent relationships. Fungi create information & nutrient highways underground, nemotodes aerate, and all the soil life eventually give their bodies to be food for another animal or plant.
Our no-till practice at the farm is still developing. We are mainly growing crops at garden scale with the goal of producing an greater portion of food served at the farm. In these early years we are developing more and more garden beds. Except for the very first beds, raised beds for which top soil was brought in, generally we have used "sheet mulches" to kill the existing grass etc. Cardboard is laid down followed by all the mulching material you can spare. See 09/30/21 post (Careful with wood-chips, they're kind hot for your veggies! They'll make nitrogen unavailable for years.) We're also have tried tarps and even old carpet to kill off existing vegetation, but cardboard decays. (Please remove plastic tapes!) There are questions on toxicitiy with at least some cardboard stocks.
Another part of no-till is leaving roots in the ground. When you clean out the garden try just cutting old plants off at soil level. With weeds, learn which weeds will come back if you don't take the roots out. It turns out that most of the carbon sequestering power of plants is in their root systems. And we're feeding the soil biota which feeds our crops which feed us which...
At farm scale, the grower of commodities and animal feeds can practice no-till by leaving roots and leaving crop residue and then using a "seed drill" to plant through that beneficial cover. Some farmers flatten cover crops before planting. For the vegetable farmer and gardeners, a prepared bed understandably makes the task of planting especially, much more manageable. If that bed has few weeds then very little cultivation, tillage or dang digging is necessary. Cultivation can be very shallow and/or limited to planting furrow.
We have been using heavy mulches at Spring Wind Farm with several purposes. First is to keep weeds down. It is incredible the numbers of weed seeds just waiting in our soils for their time to shine! Second is to feed and grow our soil biology, and related to that, third, to build up the soil organic matter in the farm's sandy loam.
No-till isn't a rule we should never break; maybe the old "double-dig" technique still sometimes has a place. One of our beds is "hugelkultur" for which you dig out some topsoil and bury rotten wood and old leaves and whatever you've got under it, creating a deposit of organic fertility. And sometimes one-last-plowing, or who knows, once in 20 years will make sense.
Observation, attention, questioning and a compassionate heart will help us be peacefully productively one with all beings in the soil food web and beyond!
Comments