5 ms·

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.
- adabyron 7mo ago
  Giving a field a year off and cover crops have been done for hundreds of years by farmers who also till. There are a lot of different combinations of variables done for both tilling and not tilling depending on many factors.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    Years off don't work great when coupled with high land prices and taxes.
    - toast0 7mo ago
      Lots of places give property tax breaks for agricultural land, which includes fallow fields.
      - pixl97 7mo ago
        Correct, the point is getting a $50,000 break doesn't make up that you didn't make $100,000 putting corn on it.
  - dylan604 7mo ago
    > Giving a field a year off and cover crops have been done for hundreds of years Even the old testament talks about letting the land sit fallow for a whole year, so thousands not just hundreds of years.
  - deleted 7mo ago
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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.

Zanfa 7mo ago

In short term profits vs long term benefits, we all know who wins.

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
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deleted 7mo ago
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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.
adabyron 7mo ago
Giving a field a year off and cover crops have been done for hundreds of years by farmers who also till. There are a lot of different combinations of variables done for both tilling and not tilling depending on many factors.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  Years off don't work great when coupled with high land prices and taxes.
  - toast0 7mo ago
    Lots of places give property tax breaks for agricultural land, which includes fallow fields.
    - pixl97 7mo ago
      Correct, the point is getting a $50,000 break doesn't make up that you didn't make $100,000 putting corn on it.
- dylan604 7mo ago
  > Giving a field a year off and cover crops have been done for hundreds of years Even the old testament talks about letting the land sit fallow for a whole year, so thousands not just hundreds of years.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]

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.