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No-Till Saves Time

April 27, 2020 by Mark Dewey

In the last post, we talked about switching to no-till in order to preserve the soil’s micro-biome, which is crucial for bringing crops to their full nutritional capacity. This post focuses on another reason not to till: weeds.

If you’ve ever grown a garden yourself, you’ve probably found that when you come out with your seeds in the spring, your garden plot is covered with debris, including plants you didn’t put there. The easiest way to get rid of that mess is to rent a Roto-tiller, which turns the surface of the soil under and brings a lower layer to the top. It looks great: loose and clean and ready for your spinach seeds. But three weeks later, your row of spinach is engulfed by thousands of invaders. Where did they come from? You planted spinach, not chickweed!

They came from that lower layer, which is full of dormant seeds that pop to life when you turn the soil and expose them to the warmth of the sun.

That same process takes place on a much larger scale when you till a 40-acre field with a tractor. Industrial farming solves the problem by spraying the field with Round-up, which kills everything but plants genetically engineered to tolerate it. Well, we don’t use Round-up, so we had to pull those weeds by hand, which takes a long time.

But when we stopped tilling the soil, we stopped bringing those seeds to the surface, so they stopped germinating.

There’s a trade-off: it’s hard to sow seeds directly onto un-tilled soil because of all that debris, including left-over weeds. So instead of turning under that debris, we cover it with compost. After a couple of years, most of the weed seeds are pretty well buried. And as long as we don’t turn over the soil, they stay that way.

Filed Under: Big Pictures, On Foggy Bottom Road Tagged With: industrial farming, no-till planting, Round-up, weed control

Preserving the Soil’s Ecosystem

April 13, 2020 by Mark Dewey

In previous years, when we used to till our fields, all the rain we’ve had in the last 48 hours would have meant there was no way I’d be heading out to pick spinach this afternoon. Too much mud. But now that we’re into our second year on no-till planting, all that rain does what it’s supposed to do: it disappears into the structure of the soil. That means I can work in the fields immediately after a thunderstorm, which is a great advantage,

It also means the soil’s inner ecosystem has a chance to fully develop.

Most of us are accustomed to thinking of soil as part of our ecosystem, and it certainly is that, but soil has its own ecosystem as well. Bacteria, fungi, and viruses form a complex micro-ecology which largely determines the health of plants and the nutritional density of crops. A teaspoon of good soil contains at least a million such tiny creatures, possibly many more. Those micro-organisms interact with the roots of plants in ways we’re just beginning to understand, but it’s clear that certain bacteria perform specific functions for specific plants, without which the plants cannot thrive. Those functions include removing toxins from soil and converting nutrients into forms the plants can utilize.

It’s also clear that different bacteria have evolved to live at different depths, and when we displace them by tilling the soil, they die by the billions. Without their bacterial partners, our food crops are vulnerable to disease and pest pressure. And if they can’t get the nutrition they need from the soil, we can’t get the nutrition we need from them.

So that’s the second reason we’re now planting into undisturbed soil: to protect the vital ecosystem we can’t see.

Next week we’ll look at how no-till planting saves labor.

Filed Under: Big Pictures, Local Farming Tagged With: no-till planting, soil microbiome

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