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Earthquake scientists reveal how overplowing weakens soil at experimental farm

• monkaiju 8mo ago
  I realize this exact data might be novel, but haven't we know that till-reliant farming was detrimental to soil for a long time? The no-till people are a huge part of the permaculture movement, also theres always folks talking about how important fungal networks are and how they're largely destroyed by tilling. I mean even Karl Marx talked a ton about soil health and while he mostly talked about "metabolic rift" not tilling (that I know about) specifically it seems like a similar focus on short term output vs long term soil health. I guess I'm just not clear on if there is actually a new serious problem being "revealed" as the title says or just being substantiated further.
  • R_D_Olivaw 8mo ago
    Agreed. This hardly seems like novel information. The method at which he arrived at it is neat though, fwiw. At the very least it adds a new vector to the position. I was also unaware of how receptive to disruption fiber optic cables were. So, at least I learned that.
  • idontwantthis 8mo ago
    If no till is better and tilling is work, why do farmers till? Why not do less work and have a better result?
    • Zanfa 8mo ago
      In short term profits vs long term benefits, we all know who wins.
    • altairprime 8mo ago
      Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort: you just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil and then dump seed in it. No-till requires things like “tracking the soil’s water retention levels”, “planting cover crops or even giving a field a year off”, and other such steps that in general can be summarized as “cost centers”. Given the economic climate, few non-corporate farmers can afford that investment without the collapse of their farm, and few corporate farmers (none at nationwide scale, afaik) are willing to invest in cost centers that threaten to decrease, rather than increase, their rate of profit growth year-over-year. One could absolutely make a case that regulatory investment in such things be imposed upon megacorp farms first, with their processes and technology made available by subsidy to smaller farms; it would be enough to structure the subsidy as inversely proportional to the acreage reaped for value, with some language ensuring that the cost of investment into land farmed by contract to a megacorp is paid to the land operator. To prevent certain abuses, they’d also have to modify farming contract law to make maintaining long-term use of the land an inalienable right, so that unsustainable output-quota farming contracts are unenforceable. This is an unlikely outcome in the U.S., but I still appreciate the researches providing more evidence in support of it.
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      • lurk2 8mo ago
        > Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort: you just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil and then dump seed in it. No-till requires things like “tracking the soil’s water retention levels”, “planting cover crops or even giving a field a year off”, and other such steps that in general can be summarized as “cost centers”. No-Till is one of those ideas like permaculture or Modern Monetary Theory that attracts emphatic advocates while going against conventional practice. It isn’t clear why it would just be being adopted now if it actually worked. Do you have any actual experience farming?
        • 8mo ago
    • Loughla 8mo ago
      No till requires access to first world country technology to make work. No till in the United States and similar countries is very very very established practice. It's not less work by any means, it's just a different kind of work with different machinery. Source: was full time farmer until Grandpa died. I'm guessing less developed countries still till the soil? I have no idea.
    • __bb 8mo ago
      The other replies make fair points, but tillage does still have it's uses. Quick examples: - Inversion tillage (ploughing) to bury green manure crops or bulky organic manure - Subsoiling (deep tillage) can help break underground compaction, to allow better root penetration - Working with soils prone to surface capping There's also a spectrum: - Full inversion tillage - Low/min-till - No-till With a wide range of operations you can perform from one end to the other. You might end up taking a mix-and-match approach as years/fields demand it. EDIT: This is a response to the question "why do it?" rather than anything in the context of the article itself.
      • ikidd 8mo ago
        This is actual reality. No-till is great until you have to till because of circumstances. Sometimes what happens needs to be dealt with; we've had years of heavy, heavy rain, and despite decades of no-till farming, it still can't absorb limitless water. That's when compaction happens, especially if you need to get crops off wet ground. So you deal with it, and start again building the soil back from tillage. You don't have to always haul out the 3-bottom plow, but even discing has a recovery period. But it's better than trying to seed into concrete. And tillage can work well by bringing up nutrients. Some crops will do this themselves to an extent, or you can plant forage crops for a time that will bring up nutrients. But subsoiling to break deep compaction or simply bring up phosphorus or potassium from lower levels can breathe new life into a field.
    • markdown 8mo ago
      Because no-till doesn't scale. It's incredible for market gardening to feed the rich who can pay a premium at a farmers market, but it's not going to feed the world.
      • bethekidyouwant 8mo ago
        Modern farming already uses low or no till.
      • boccaff 8mo ago
        The estimated area of no-till in Brazil is between 33 to 50 million hectares. It won't be hard for you to find videos of no-till corn being planted following soybean. There is also grass cover that is planted after the main crop season, that is later grazed. This cover stays till the next year and the new crop is planted without tilling. You may need to use "plantio direto" "milho safrinha" and "braquiária de cobertura" plus some translation.
        • markdown 8mo ago
          I've seen those videos, and they all look terrible. > There is also grass cover that is planted after the main crop season, that is later grazed Grazing compacts the soil, making it impossible to plant in without tilling. So no, this isn't workable.
      • ikidd 8mo ago
        No-till feeds the world. The amount of no-till in current full-scale agriculture is by far the biggest proportion in North America and Europe.
    • ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
      If you want to till, you need quite a big tractor that burns quite a lot of diesel to drag a cultivator through the soil. This is not the same as a plough, but at some point you'll end up ploughing. Go and stick a spade in your garden and then try and drag it sideways. Yeah, not easy, eh? Bit too much to do by hand. If you want to do "no till", you can get away with a less powerful tractor because you don't need to drag a cultivator through the soil, you just need one that can carry a 400 litre sprayer that blasts glyphosate all over everything every couple of weeks. Eventually all that's left are the glyphosate-resistant plants that are choking out your crops. And that's if your soil conditions are actually in any way suitable for no-till, which they often aren't.
  • altairprime 8mo ago
    The original article is markedly better at explaining that this is substantiation through direct evidence of soil structure in live fields, as opposed to e.g. core samples or whatever. https://www.washington.edu/news/2026/03/19/earthquake-scientists-reveal-how-overplowing-weakens-soil-at-experimental-farm/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2026/03/19/earthquake-scient...
  • huijzer 8mo ago
    After Marx’s philosophy caused a famine that led millions to die, you think he has useful agriculture knowledge to teach us?
    • AngryData 8mo ago
      You should maybe do a bit more reading on what Marx actually said and promoted versus what the USSR actually did in practice. Farming co-ops have been growing consistently since from before you were born, and is the most direct example of Marx's economic ideals in practice. The USSR and Maoist China did nothing to follow Marxist principles, that was just their leadership's political scape goat to do whatever they wanted because they knew people weren't going to actually read Marx's works. The actual communists that followed Marxist principles are the ones that coined the term "tankies" to call out their leaders and their supporters for abandoning Marxist philosophy. You might as well talk shit about democracy and point at North Korea because they obviously must represent democracy, its in the name of their country and they talk about how awesome their elections are every year. Also, what someone's overall economic ideals and philosophy amount to has fuck all to do with what are the best farming practices.
• altairprime 8mo ago
  Given the discovered ability of fiberoptics to sense water content, a kind of fiber fabric could be deployed to sense water levels across an entire field at the cubic yard level. The sensing controller would end up resembling an LCD addressing controller in reverse, with row/column/subpixel (sub-terranean-pixels!) breakout. Not that pixel-addressed farm fields are going to be efficient to work yet, lacking both processes and tooling for soil, seed, and harvest — but with sensing- and tool-assisted farming, we ought to be more able to harness the soul that we have without destroying it with the sledgehammer-nail “till the whole field” approach.
  • contingencies 8mo ago
    Precision weeding is a thing. Some do it with poison, some do it with picking, some do it spraying hot oil, others do it spraying hot water. Any way you do it, it basically removes the weeding argument for tilling soil... but only if the weeds are small. If the weeds are large (think aggressive rhizomes or grasses) it wont be effective. Other arguments for tilling exist: aeration, mixing-in of new organic content/fertilizer (not really necessary: green waste can just be dumped at surface level in many cases, and this is already becoming more common in mass-agriculture with 'cover crops'), furrow-creation for seed planting, etc. Fundamentally, leaving a field uncovered for any length of time is bad and destroys the soil more than if you'd just let it grow weeds or a temporary crop for awhile then culled that as in-place fertilizer for a next crop. A few months ago some friends of mine visited Australia from overseas and I took them to one of the older wineries in the area. The winery manages something like 10-20 major fields. They brought in a new viticulturalist to manage the fields and the first thing he did was introduce cover crops. In the tasting, they brought out soil cores from before and after the changes, which had only been in place for two years. The difference was tremendous. The old methods, unquestioned for decades, left the soil dry, poor, and largely infertile. The new methods restored organic matter, moisture retention, and a significant sub-surface biome.
    • altairprime 8mo ago
      Noted(?). Um: did you mean to comment on the main post instead of my comment? I'm only talking about futuristic pixel-grid stuff related to the fiberoptics advancement, so I'm not quite sure what questions to ask here about the bulk of your response re: soil biome management; is there some connection I’m missing? Perhaps: Are there already tilling solutions that can do one square yard only, to whatever specified depth, in use at this winery?
• CrzyLngPwd 8mo ago
  That heavy clay soil in the main photo looks awful. I have around 45 acres of heavy clay, poor agricultural land, which would look very similar to that if we allowed heavy machinery, or even an ATV, on it when it is sodden.
• trusted_brother 8mo ago
  Yes this is entirely true and we must ban farming immediately.
  • steve_adams_86 8mo ago
    Yeah, why don't people just go to the grocery store for food instead of making a mess with farming?
• regus 8mo ago
  Overplowing is what created the dust storms of the Great Depression Dust Bowl era.
  • youknownothing 8mo ago
    that and the removal of the native grass, which largely kept the soil in place.
  • ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
    That and only raising arable crops without turning fields over to pasture and allowing cattle and sheep to graze them. You have to do that, so the grasses and clovers can replenish the soil. We eat because there's six inches of earth, it rains, and cows shit solid gold.
• aaron695 8mo ago
  [dead]
• heathrow83829 8mo ago
  to till or not to till, that's the question. one way to look at is check the yields that result from dig vs no dig. Charles dowding did exactly that. for seven years he had two plots, one where he dug and one where he didn't. in each one he added the same amount of compost and grew teh same crops on both sides. Overall, the nodig plot harvest 10% more. but here's where it gets interesting. those yields were not uniformly spread across the vegetable types. if you dig into the data, you'll see, some did quite worse with dig and some did quite better. guess which ones did better on dig? Potatoes, Rutabagas, carrots and parsnips and cabbage all did better in Dig! roughly to the tune of about Potatoes 21%, carrots 21%, Rutabaga 14%, Cabbage, 11%, broad beans 10% better. it's all published in his books. Everything else did better with no dig. Shallots especially did 33% better with no-dig, ales 21% better, onions 22% better with no dig.
  • chongli 8mo ago
    The no dig method has taken on a life of its own, almost a religion. It's probably a mistake for most people though. "One dig" is almost always going to be superior, given soil that has never been used for gardening before. Trying to start a no dig garden in some heavily compacted, organic-poor, heavy clay soil is going to lead to extreme disappointment.
    • fuzzy_biscuit 8mo ago
      We call that New Jersey here!
      • moron4hire 8mo ago
        The dirt in my part of Virginia is almost suitable for pottery straight out of the ground. Just need to filter out the feldspar, quartz, and gold first.
        • ch4s3 8mo ago
          I go to my mom’s old farm and marvel at the thought of them having grown anything in that hard red ground.
• ggm 8mo ago
  Angus Calder "the people's war" about the british home front in WW2 notes older farmworkers in the south downs virtually crying as land which had been unploughed since the norman conquest was put to the plough because of grain shortages from the U boat war. Maybe they knew a thing or two (low earthquake zone, it has to be said)
• nodesocket 8mo ago
  I admit farming knowledge is not my strong suit, but I thoroughly enjoyed the Amazon series Clarkson’s Farm. If you want to see a country destroy its agriculture industry, look no further than the UK. Their shortsightedness, bureaucracy, and blind acceptance of doomer environmentalists essentially bankrupted farmers in the country side.
  • tonyedgecombe 8mo ago
    I wouldn’t watch Clarkson’s Farm for its educational value. It’s pure entertainment. Harry’s Farm on YouTube is much better.
    • ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
      Both are good. Clarkson's Farm is surprisingly accurate.
• worthless-trash 8mo ago
  Zero / minimal tillage has been a thing for decades, im surprised this is news.
  • torlok 8mo ago
    It's not. The news is the usage of fiberoptics to do the measurement, and prove the effects of tillage scientifically. The title manages to both confuse tillage with plowing, and bury the lede.
    • worthless-trash 8mo ago
      Thank you for the explanation, now the article is available to read, it has stopped being HN hugged to death.
• prewett 8mo ago
  I think the article's theory on why people plow is wrong: it is not to let the soil hold more water, but to get rid of weeds. I know someone who did no-till for a while, and he found that you have to spray with glyphosate to keep the weeds down. Eventually the weeds that had evolved to be glyphosate-resistent spread to his area, and he had to go back to regular plowing. He said that the no-till really improved the soil, though.
  • Saline9515 8mo ago
    No-till requires to have different crop patterns, where you plant again right after harvesting to avoid weeds overgrowth.
    • erikerikson 8mo ago
      And/or tarp to occultate the weeds and dormant seedstock
  • modo_mario 8mo ago
    I think no till makes most/only sense for intensive market gardening. Where you're weeding by hand or in greenhouses and maybe applying a recurring layer of compost and maybe cover crops to prevent the soil from being bare.
    • tbossanova 8mo ago
      Sounds great, let’s have more of that!
      • ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
        You're already complaining about the price of food, when farmers are barely breaking even on it. You won't pay ten quid for a sustainably-farmed chicken, and I bet you're really really not going to pay ten quid for one single hand-grown ecologically-neutral farmed carrot. And if you are, I've got some carrots for you right here. Discount if you order them in multiples of ten.
• WaitWaitWha 8mo ago
  Just to be clear, plowing and tilling are not the same thing, and this article implies the researchers might be using it interchangeably. They bundle different soil-disturbance practices together, irrelevant of their uses, and potential compaction impact. Of course, tilling can also just be used as a generic term for all of the soil management in farms, but this is never explained. It is also unclear if the paper is removing traffic compaction or it is part of their results. when an MF 8700 with 23,800 pounds rolls around it will compact things. A lot. I have a lunch box to prove it. Would love to see no-till vs shallow till vs deep plowing. For this paper, they should have introduce and have primary conclusion around the technical data gathering as a novel idea, not draw conclusion from the collected data. The physics and sensing seems rigorous. Understanding of agricultural taxonomy, farming, is coarse at best. 40 hours of total data during rain is a wee bit short. 2cm depth for the fiber is only going to sense near- or surface. Most crops go deeper than that. Single-site experiment on a single type of soil is very narrow. To me, plowing (like a chisel plow or moldboard) is to break up soil, and 'folds' old crop like corn stalks back in. It is also the first step for never-used land prep for growing stuff. Usually, beginning of season, compacting, or new site. 8 to 20 inches deep. can flip the soil upside down. Tilling gets the soil ready for seed, aeration, crumble large lumps and fill larger gaps on the surface, or mix fertilizer/compost into soil. 4 to 12 inches deep. Discing aka harrowing (disc harrow) usually will cut the remaining roots a few inches deep, often done post plowing. good for putting last years leftovers just a few inches under. 4 to 6 inches. Note that it seems that as the field size gets smaller, the tilling vs harrowing seems to flip? At least how people consider using them. (edit: I am all over with this one, but I think the gist comes through.)
  • universa1 8mo ago
    What one has to keep in mind as well, that even though tractors are really heavy they spread that weight across a large area (using low tire pressures and having massive tires to begin with). So, iirc, the per area impact is even lower then a human. It impacts a lot larger area, though! Plowing vs tilling is also very much about soil erosion and depends very much of the location you are in.
    • 8mo ago
• PunchyHamster 8mo ago
  ...isn't loosening the soil the entire point of plowing ? Like, congratulations, you have discovered what farmers already knew. Also, just plowing is pointless, the point is to grew plants better, ignoring that and just looking at moisure at some level is pointless
• destitude 8mo ago
  Let alone the wind erosion from having exposed soil over winter.