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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 p

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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  In short term profits vs long term benefits, we all know who wins.
- altairprime 7mo 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 7mo 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?
    - arthurbrown 7mo ago
      What an odd response. We have centuries of evidence for minimal disturbance agriculture supporting civilizations. What evidently does NOT work is the quite new practice of industrial tilling and fertilizer, which is causing rapid breakdown of our natural environment and future potential for food production.
      - altairprime 7mo ago
        Ideally, industrial farming will use this new data to min/max tilling intervals for higher production per acre, which is still wildly suboptimal but at least provably better than arbitrary downtime practices (or even none) that they would otherwise settle on. If nothing else, that’s language their shareholders will listen to: “use fewer resources to produce more goods” is the holy grail of corporations, and fertilizer must be the death of their opex today.
      - thrownthatway 7mo ago
        What do you mean “does not work”? The industrial practices that have enable us to feed a population of 8 billion, with surplus - a lot of food is thrown out as waste because we have so much of it we really don’t have to be super strict with it. The industrial practices that have allowed the majority of the population to do something other than be directly involved in agriculture. What part of that isn’t working? The sky is falling, co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks. We’ve been told these things for, what, at least sixty years now. Now we can add A.I. will de-employment everyone. I don’t believe any of it.
- Loughla 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
    Modern farming already uses low or no till.
  - boccaff 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
After Marx’s philosophy caused a famine that led millions to die, you think he has useful agriculture knowledge to teach us?
- AngryData 7mo 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.

R_D_Olivaw 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
In short term profits vs long term benefits, we all know who wins.
altairprime 7mo 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.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- lurk2 7mo 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?
  - arthurbrown 7mo ago
    What an odd response. We have centuries of evidence for minimal disturbance agriculture supporting civilizations. What evidently does NOT work is the quite new practice of industrial tilling and fertilizer, which is causing rapid breakdown of our natural environment and future potential for food production.
    - altairprime 7mo ago
      Ideally, industrial farming will use this new data to min/max tilling intervals for higher production per acre, which is still wildly suboptimal but at least provably better than arbitrary downtime practices (or even none) that they would otherwise settle on. If nothing else, that’s language their shareholders will listen to: “use fewer resources to produce more goods” is the holy grail of corporations, and fertilizer must be the death of their opex today.
    - thrownthatway 7mo ago
      What do you mean “does not work”? The industrial practices that have enable us to feed a population of 8 billion, with surplus - a lot of food is thrown out as waste because we have so much of it we really don’t have to be super strict with it. The industrial practices that have allowed the majority of the population to do something other than be directly involved in agriculture. What part of that isn’t working? The sky is falling, co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks. We’ve been told these things for, what, at least sixty years now. Now we can add A.I. will de-employment everyone. I don’t believe any of it.
Loughla 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
  Modern farming already uses low or no till.
- boccaff 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago

After Marx’s philosophy caused a famine that led millions to die, you think he has useful agriculture knowledge to teach us?

AngryData 7mo 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.