Talk:No-till farming

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Picture
The first references I can find to scientists trying no-tillage, pre-dated the advent of the herbicides paraquat and gylphosate and involved G S Robinson and M W Cross in New Zealand (Refs: Cross, M W 1957, Proceedings of the Massey Agricultural College Dairy Farmers' Conference, pp 77-84; Robinson, G S & Cross, M W 1957, New Zealand Journal of Agriculture, 95, pp 283-288).

Also the terms "Chemical Plowing" and "Chemical Farming" were indeed used for a short period in the 1960s presumably because the weed control function of plowing was seen as being undertaken by chemicals instead. But consumer resistance to agricultural chemicals and the wider appreciation that no-tillage (a) was not exclusively dependent on agricultural chemicals anyway (i.e. it still worked without any chemicals), and (b) was better not to be seen as being even closely associated with chemicals, soon persuaded proponents of no-tillage to drop all reference to chemicals in the name.

Much of this is explained in the one reference that seems not to have been quoted: "No-Tillage Seeding in Conservation Agriculture" (Baker, Saxton, Ritchie, Chamen, Reicosky, Ribeiro, Justice and Hobbs (2006). FAO and CABI joint publication 326 pages) ```` — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bakerbntr (talk • contribs) 01:55, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Perhaps a picture would help, spuch as that at: http://whyfiles.org/241GM_2/images/corn_no_till.jpg
 * I'd be nice if someone more familiar with image use could find something. That one comes from the USDA. Sabar 05:58, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Reader alert: content needs corrections, edits

 * Readers unfamiliar with no-till farming should be cautioned that there are errors in this article, starting with the first line: "No-till farming, also known as conservation tillage..." No-till farming is one of many types under the broad heading of conservation tillage. For a good introduction to these definitions see: http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/AFSIC_pubs/srb9902.htm.


 * In my own experience in the Midwest U.S., dating back to the 1970s with the advent of reduced and no-tillage systems, I never once heard no-till called "chemical farming." That may have been a parochialism. I assume so. There deserves to be a reference to where the "chemical farming" story comes from. It should identify who exactly wanted to "promote the idea of no-till being more natural." I had never heard of such a thing. I doubt it deserves mention in the introduction to the article.


 * The section "Pros and Cons" sets the stage for contributor bias. I would recommend dropping that section altogether and limit contributions to things readily citable and verifiable. That "Erosion" would be listed as a "Con" for no-till mystifies me, and I think would mislead anyone seeking to learn more about no-tillage systems. Decisiondoctor 18:27, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

http://www.fao.org/ag/ca/CA-Publications/ISTRO%202009.pdf pretty good reference. I'm gonna use some statistics from this. Rolf started to research no-till in Brazil in 1972 so he's one of the top researches of no-till in the world. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.47.35.252 (talk) 23:23, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

why do people use no-till farming

 * Think about making several passes over a field with a different piece of equipment each time simply to prepare the field for planting. The cost of fuel and time consumed are decreased dramatically by reducing the number of "passes" over the field. This is only one benefit though. Meng.benjamin 13:10, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

no-till farming'
This doesn't seem to be a very balanced article. Perhaps more CONS could be listed? I'm noticing that in the CONS area it lists what appears to be a minor con that it then brushs aside.
 * Spruced it up with some more downsides found from a googling, and seperated them out into subsections.

new revolutionary farming technique: don't plow
Yeah, same here. It seems like no-till farming is the only way to do it, as sold in the article.

Meanwhile I know farming has been going on for many thousands of years, with plows turning over the soil, in endless history and nursery rhymes and stories about penniless farmers with a plow pulled by a solitary cow, lumbering across the field before spring planting. Were they stupid? Suddenly 1940 comes around and people say, gosh, all this plowing and stuff we've been doing for thousands of years, let's try NOT plowing. Hey! It works! what a great idea! why didn't we think of it sooner?

Something tells me there's big, serious advantages to plowing a field. I mean, they're sortof listed in the article, briefly, then left behind. Something tells me that lazy farmers might occasionally try to grow crops without plowing, with bad results, and that's why farmers have plowed their fields as a standard technique, like, forever. It would be nice if there was some acknowledgment of this history and why it's been done for thousands of years that way. OsamaBinLogin (talk) 07:22, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

" never compromised."
"With precision fertilizer and seed placement yields are never compromised." What does this mean? --Gbleem 16:19, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

No merging
I would like to suggest that this article is not merged with "no-dig gardening" because they are completelly different uses. --201.6.65.26 20:29, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

No-dig gardening is a method of preparing a garden bed via the layering of hay, manure, soil and soil amendments. It is intensive and usually restricted to home or community garden applications. No-till is associated with broad-acre cropping and is related to minimizing soil disturbance rather than building layers.


 * I agree. No merging. Farming is different from gardening in both purpose and method. Gbuffett 22:53, 28 September 2007 (UTC)


 * no merger no-till farming is a term for environmental science as a method to prevent soil erosion. No-dig gardening is a term coined by organic farmers. Skeletonman36 23:08, 2 December 2007 (UTC)


 * no merger Makes no sense SoilMan2007 (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 18:29, 5 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Don't redirect Conservation tillage to no till. There are multiple kinds of conservation tillage systems and no-till is just one of them. I made up a new conservation tillage systems page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_tillage_Systems).  The problem is that people who want to post information about topics like strip tillage (one kind of conservation tillage system) can't put it under no till or link to it from a conservation tillage system page.  Case in point, we just added an entry for stip-tillage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip-Till). I'm sorry if I'm posting this in the wrong spot. By the way, strip tillage searches should go to the new strip-till page system.  How do you change that. Thanks, Regards,SoilMan2007 (talk) December 5, 2007.  —Preceding comment was added at 18:46, 5 December 2007 (UTC)


 * No merger. An article covering both would be unworkable. -- Paleorthid (talk) 05:49, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

POV
I have tagged this page as being potentially POV, as it does not seem to me to give a balanced view of no-till agriculture. It strikes me that it has been written largely by advocates of no-till agriculture, that citations are lacking for a lot of big claims, and that all discussion of the disadvantages is largely to dismiss them (again without citations). I know little about the subject, but I appeal for anyone who does to have a go at improving the article. Thomas K (talk) 15:23, 4 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I couldn't agree more! My father and I had a lot of friends who tried no-till, and having neither light, loamy soil, nor light sandy soil, nor a river-drained flood plain, it did nothing to prevent erosion, and by mid-summer created soil so hard crop roots were unable to sufficiently penetrate the soil to grow. By the 3rd year planting itself became almost impossible, and nitrogen and water from snow was unable to penetrate the soil to any depth.


 * The page is also inconsistent internally, although I doubt it was noticed. Carbon sequestration occurs only if organic material is not broken down into rich, growth promoting compost, so if carbon sequestration is occurring, it is proof that no-till is a miserable failure at promoting long-term fertility of the host soil.


 * If your dirt floats, or blows easily, then no-till may have advantages. If your plot of land doesn't drain into a river or lake, and is too heavy to blow, it can't erode, so no benefit is available to be had. If your soil is heavy, probably rich in clay, it's a disaster. Anyone who thinks Brazil's soils or drainage topology offers a valid model for most of the US Midwest is woefully ignorant.


 * Healthy prairie depended on the hooves of animals like the Buffalo to break the turf so water and nutrients could get down into the soil. No-till suggests that soils are best if never broken. This is ludicrous for most soil types and most drainage topographies in the US breadbasket. This page is nothing but a bunch of half-wit cheer leading for the no-til cause without any discussion of where or how it might offer benefit. What it promotes is do-nothing farming, because doing nothing is pretty darned cheap, except for the spraying, extra fertilizer, and extra planting of cover crops, of course.

-- --71.193.1.41 (talk) 08:31, 30 September 2011 (UTC)


 * I'll attempt to start improving the article w/ citations etc. once I get moved into my new apartment :) and have time to do so. However, based upon what I've read in my studies, the article doesn't stray too far from the major scientific findings about no-till practices. Jason Patton (talk) 22:18, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

I would suggest using the Masanobu Fukuoka books (The One-Straw Revolution, The Natural Way of Farming, and The Road Back to Nature) as cites for some of the no till claims. In his books, Fukuoka claims several times to obtain yields similar or higher than conventional agriculture with his 'no-till do-nothing' method. Probably references to his work might be of help to establish some scientific background to this article. Imartinbragado (talk) 18:25, 20 August 2008 (UTC)


 * (Still busy w/ school starting and adjusting to life as a graduate student...) I would rather be careful and stick to what is published in scientific journals since no-till is a relatively new subject.  While I'm sure Fukuoka knows his stuff, he doesn't have much in the way of actual scientific articles .  In improving the (N)POV of the article, we should be careful not to cite books written from a particular POV and stick to what "the science" has to say, which is still quite no-till positive. Jason Patton (talk) 23:33, 20 August 2008 (UTC)


 * whilst i think fukuoka is maybe worth mentioning, because there might be parallels, it is small scale farming and has quite a different philosophy then modern no till farming. could put him into see also, just seen he is already there.

i just wanted to stress that no til farming is quite relevant in modern highly mechanized agriculture which does not have a lot to do with a do nothing approach.. Truetom (talk) 11:07, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

If no one disagrees, I think it should be ok to remove the POV warning from the main page, as I think the situation has been remedied. Uaequals42 May 6, 2009 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Uaequals42 (talk • contribs) 17:43, 6 May 2009 (UTC)
 * It's a definite improvement (and thanks for all your work on it, the history page shows a long litany of your contributions), but reading through the whole thing, it still comes across as something of an advocacy piece. For example, each item in the 'disadvantages' section is rounded off with a "but this is OK really, because..." type sentence, usually without any citation. I'm not a farmer, but I still see many fields being ploughed, so I can't imagine the case is as clear cut as the article still seems to suggest. I don't know enough to work on it myself, unfortunately. Thomas K (talk) 16:56, 7 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Agreed. For example, "Answers to these questions are urgently needed to provide strategies for promoting no-till as a way to enhance agricultural sustainability for future generations."  Urgent for whom?  By what authority?  Etc.  Those are opinions.  There are several such occurrences of this style of writing which weakens the article's value.  Advocacy has a place elsewhere, but an advocate writing on WP should strive for NPOV to win over his audience with truth.  A POV piece will only turn away those who the author wishes to convince.  BillMcGonigle (talk) 04:50, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

I'll try to fix that, good point. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Uaequals42 (talk • contribs) 22:50, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

I just realized that some of the management things aren't disadvantages, just things that have to be done differently. So I think I'm going to move them out of disadvantages and Advantages and into a section of their own. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Uaequals42 (talk • contribs) 23:54, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

I've been looking, and the only disadvantage anyone seems to give is that is the use of herbicides for weed control and that the equipment is more expensive. I'll continue cleaning up stuff and adding references, but I think all the disadvantages are listed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Uaequals42 (talk • contribs) 16:51, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

conservation tillage
the german and the french article that are linked to this one (direktsaat and tcs, technique de culture simplifie) correspond rather to conservation tillage which is essentially working without ploughing. i propose that there should be an article with this title, currently it is only a section in the article tillage and that the french and german article are linked to that one. conservation tillage is also more relevant in terms of surfaces than no till farming. i think there is a confusion in this article between permaculture and fukuoka style cultivation which is practised more or less by hobby gardeners on a gardening style and conservation tillage which is a modern farming technique that more often that not relies on usage of herbicides.Truetom (talk) 11:19, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
 * nope, a google search shows me that no till, reduced tillage and conservation tillage should maybe be grouped in the same article, still there is a little confusion here about the terminology that should be fixed.Truetom (talk) 11:24, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Layout
I've changed the layout so that there is one advantages title and a disadvantages title. The content needs further work but I think that this a more sensible layout. I've added the advantantage that it doesn't disturb archaeological sites too. I've heard a lot about the fact that ploughing has destroyed long barrows and other burial structures near where I live. Smartse (talk) 12:31, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm actually thinking it might make sense to undo the advantage, disadvantage structure and just do it by subject matter. Currently, because of adv./dis./neither, some stuff is being repeated multiple times. Instead of having artifacts under both, just have an artifact section that lists the upside and the downside in a couple paragraphs and so on. What does everyone else think? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Uaequals42 (talk • contribs) 04:14, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Zaï
Could the zaï-system be mentioned or placed in the see also section ? Article still needs to be made; if anyone is intrested, see http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/09/soil/mann-text.html for information on zaï-system —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.245.187.57 (talk) 17:56, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
 * (For anyone else following the link, Zai isn't mentioned until the sixth page). Digging a lot of holes a foot deep doesn't really count as no-till, so it's not appropriate as a section of this. Linking as a 'see also' might work on conservation tillage or even tillage, but the article has to be written first. If you're interested, perhaps start the article yourself? Thomas Kluyver (talk) 14:11, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

crops
Can the research of Derk van Balen (Lelystad) be included. It stated that higher productivity was proven with the new crops carrot, wheat, sugar beet and barley —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.182.193.143 (talk) 11:29, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

Procedure
Perhaps I am misreading this article, but I can't find an explanation of the technique in here. How exactly is no-till performed? What steps are taken to grow a crop in this system? 128.163.157.49 (talk) 19:05, 30 July 2009 (UTC) July 2009

ChrisCl85 (talk) 20:22, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

No till is performed just as it sounds. Without working the ground after harvest, no till is performed by pulling a planter through an unplowed, harvested field in the spring. It has numerous drawbacks, such as later planting of corn, an undesirable seed bed for planting, increased bio-mass on the surface, which can lead to germination failure if the planter doesn't work right, and an increase in chemical runoff into streams.

I am an Agricultural Appraiser, and I deal with literally all types of farming practices in Illinois. Farmers who use land for the production of agricultural row crop and oil seeds, which have been classified as "Highly Erodible Land" by his or her counties' Natural Resources and Conservation Service Office (NRCS) must file a conservation plan with the local NRCS office in order to farm it. Most of the time that conservation plan involves the use of no till, minimum till, or a use of the many practices of conservation tillage.

In other words, farmers use no till here in Illinois on rolling ground that has a much higher incidence of erosion. Some farmers use no till on flat ground, however the increased use of chemicals make the cost of widespread use of no till farming prohibitive. Additionally, farmers tend to use a less radical approach to land management such as strip tilling or minimum tilling.

I agree that the article leans quite heavily towards advocating the use of no till farming on a widespread basis, and should be revised to present an unbiased assessment of the pros and cons of using no till versus modern tillage practices.

Personally, I believe that no till should be used on highly erodible land, but on flat ground there is no need to replace tilling the soil with spraying several passes of roundup (or another burn down herbicide) to rid the field of weeds. No till is only possible with the use of non-selective herbicides.


 * Would you have the necessary knowledge to work on/help with the revisions you mention? I originally tagged it point-of view over a year and a half ago, but I don't know enough to work on it myself. (I'll post the same on your talk page, in case you don't read this) Thomas Kluyver (talk) 14:01, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

No Till only good for Cereal Crops
I think this article was not even close to being complete. It showed no evidence of fuel usage and it also did not mention that other crops need to be tilled to grow like potatoes and carrots and so forth. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.27.110.174 (talk) 05:19, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

I have requested cleanup on this article
There are multiple issues which must be resolved Tom (talk) 16:39, 20 January 2013 (UTC)
 * not in encyclopedic language
 * duplicated text in multiple sections
 * section heading whose only content says to refer to another section
 * for the most part the sections only have a sentence or two of information, not enough to warrant a separate section. as such, they should be either combined into fewer number of sections, or expanded so that each has enough information to stand on its own.

Aeration
Shouldn't the broadfork be mentioned, as well as the principle of this tool. The tool breaks the soil and aerates it, without overturning the soil. I think it complies completely with no-till farming, although perhaps not with no-dig gardening. In most cases, the tool is even indispensable for no-till agriculture. KVDP (talk) 12:41, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

flaming - aka flame is ionized particles over burning material
i have removed from "Increased Chemical Usage" section the word "flaming" as an alternative for all killing herbicide use. i replaced the word flaming with "burning", but without hyperlinking the word to another article.

Reasons: burning seemed to me a more appropriate word, though i am not an expert on toil-free farming. I belive the hyperlink of the deleted word "flaming" needed to be deleted, since it led to the article about flame (a generic term in physics and chemistry), that has no connection to the particular method used in farming.(80.98.114.70 (talk) 22:14, 28 November 2015 (UTC)).

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Still POV
I was just going to add a chunk of text, from "Agroecology", where it didn't belong (none of the 15 sources used established no-tillage had anything to do with agroecology), but this article needs heavy editing to reduce promotionalism and plain untruths, as has been mentioned on this talk page since 2009 by everyone from soil scientists to farmer's anecdotes to Osama bin Login. Already the second sentence of the lede is not true. It is full of unsourced promotional opinion. It is out of date, someone added all this stuff about carbon credits in 2009, the CCE had sunk from $7.50 to $0.05 a share by then, and the exchange shut down the following year after 9 months of zero trades. My reading is that there is little evidence no-tillage increases soil carbon content, in fact the opposite appears true, and there are good articles referencing this in this article! Problems with the method like excessive and expensive herbicide (round-up) use are brushed aside. I think before adding more I will work on this for a bit -this will mean trimming much of this article. The tillage article could also use some work -the history section, for example, is totally without references and almost every statement is factually wrong (tractors, horses). Cheers,  Leo Breman (talk) 14:41, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

New style of organic no-till farming is absent in article
I'm a small scale (less than 5 hectares) farmer working under the principles of regenerative agriculture, a sub-type of organic farming which goes further and sees farming as a way to regenerate nature locally. There's a growing and global group of farmers practicing this, but their way of working is entirely absent in this article. I believe that focussing exclusively on herbicide reliant large scale no-till agriculture in this article is a mistake. 89.205.225.114 (talk) 11:57, 10 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Regenerative agriculture is linked in the see also section of this article. To include more information, you would need a WP:RS that covers a connection between no-till and regenerative agriculture.Dialectric (talk) 17:51, 10 August 2022 (UTC)