The Benefits of No-Till
By Andrew Mefferd
Against the drawbacks of tillage, we can evaluate the advantages of foregoing tillage. One of the most exciting things about no-till is that, if you already have a farm, you may not need to buy anything or only make a minimal investment to try the methods. Most growers already have what they need to try no-till lying around the farm.
Increased Efficiency of Time
Most tillage systems require at least three passes over the field before they are ready to plant, requiring no less than three different pieces of equipment, and a tractor or horses to pull them with. The no-till systems in this book typically skip the step of tillage by using a mulch that is either left in place or removed to prepare the soil for planting.
These mulches require less investment than tillage in every aspect:
• No-till takes less time than tillage
• No-till takes less equipment than tillage
• No-till takes less energy (in the form of tractor or horse power)
• No-till doesn’t burn up organic matter the way tillage does
• No-till should require less work to prepare a field than tillage, with an additional advantage. Tractor work has to take place when a field is sufficiently dry, meaning that in humid regions farmers are at the mercy of the weather to start getting their fields ready in the spring.
On paper this may not seem like a big deal but in practice, getting a late start to the season can have a real impact on profitability and happiness. In a wet spring, farmers are at the mercy of the weather, waiting for fields to dry out. It can be really frustrating to sit and wait as planting dates go by on the calendar and transplants get too big in the greenhouse because the field is too wet to till.
Consider that most no-till systems require no tractor implements, and no tractor. The basic requirements are to smother whatever is growing in a field with some type of mulch, fertilize, and plant. While tractors can be handy for moving things around, they are by no means necessary, and several of the no-till farms I visited didn’t even have any.
Increasing the Viability of Smaller Farms
In a world where large-scale commodity agriculture is given so many advantages through subsidies and other government support, regenerative agriculture needs all the help it can get.
People want real food, as shown by the steady growth of farmers markets and organic food sales. The connection between having smaller farms and having more real food available may not at first be apparent, so let’s make it clear: some farm models have a certain size below which they don’t make sense. The size and expense of the infrastructure dictate the expanse of the farm.
No-till stops the equipment from dictating the scale of the farm and lets the farm be the size it wants to be. For example, it doesn’t make sense to buy a $250K tractor to cultivate an acre. It doesn’t even make sense to buy a $25K tractor to cultivate an acre. To cite a personal example, even though we started our farm on three acres, I felt like we needed a tractor, mainly for tillage. So we ended up buying a tractor for our three acres, and it always felt like a bull in a china shop working on our vegetable beds.
Not everyone wants to have a big farm. I want people to feel like they can start a farm whether they have access to a lot of land or money or not. More farms will be started if people can start them on very small acreages with very little investment. Then those who are successful can choose whether to scale up or stay small.
I don’t personally have any favoritism about farm size. I think that to increase the amount and access to local food, we need lots more small, medium, and large farms. Realistically though, as someone who wants to see this change take place, I know more people have the resources and management skills to start a small farm than a big one. Lowering the amount of investment and land needed to start a farm is an important way to get more farms started.
Down-Scalability
Because of the reduced requirement for equipment, no-till enables smaller units of land to be economically viable units. This is especially important for urban and suburban farms. Most suburban and especially urban areas do not have large uninterrupted tracts of land, and land prices may be high. Reducing the size of the piece of land necessary for a viable commercial farm makes it possible for people to start successful farms on smaller pieces of land. In order to re-localize our food system, we need to have lots of new farms of all sizes everywhere— including where much of the population is concentrated, in cities and suburbs.
Also, a smaller “entry level” size for commercial farms will open up farming to more people. I’ve known a number of people who wanted to farm but could not afford the investment in land or equipment. Reducing the necessary footprint size increases the number of people who can start farms. And more small farms means more farms of all sizes. Because some people who start small farms will scale them up to medium and large farms. And what we need is more farms of all sizes everywhere.
As in any industry, economy of scale is often used to increase efficiency in farming. Alas, by definition economies of scale are not available to small farms. The cumulative effect of the efficiencies of no-till enables one to run a commercially viable, living-wage farm on a very small footprint. So a farmer doesn’t feel like they have to grow on a large acreage in order to make a living.
Increased Efficiency of Organic Matter (OM)
The no-till growers I visited with saw organic matter (OM) levels go up quickly after adopting no-till practices. Increasing OM in the soil makes plants grow better for a lot of different reasons, so it is a best practice of farming to try and increase OM over time. Cover cropping and adding compost are best practices because in addition to adding nutrients to the soil, they tend to increase soil OM.
In addition to grinding and incorporating whatever is growing in the soil where a crop needs to go, the churning of tillage burns up OM and in the process releases nutrients. So tillage systems need to add OM every year in order to make up for what they burn up during tillage, just to maintain equilibrium and stay at a constant level. Which is why no-till growers see a rapid rise in OM after adopting no-till methods—they are building soil without the burning up of OM that occurs during tillage.
Simplicity
The beauty of these methods is their simplicity; some of them could be explained in a sentence. Deep mulching with compost, for example, could be boiled down to: Apply a thick enough layer of weed-free compost to suppress weeds, and then plant into it. Of course, more information than that is helpful to get started, since the devil (and the success) is in the details.
Reduced Mechanization
Along with their simplicity, no-till methods should result in a reduction in mechanization and the complications that go along with it: owning equipment, fixing it, fueling it, and the emissions it produces. I used to think that tractors were a necessary evil, but no-till made me realize they’re not necessary for having a profitable farm.
Efficient Use of Space
With less space devoted to paths, turnarounds, and headlands for equipment, farms can be more productive because more of the space is devoted to growing crops. For most of those systems using permanent beds, fertility can be concentrated on the growing area where it is needed. Seeds can be scattered at higher density than with cultivation because space doesn’t need to be left open for passes of the cultivator.
Quick Successions
Because time doesn’t have to be taken to till between crops, many no-tillers I talked to were able to re-plant a harvested bed within the same day or very quickly after harvest. This maximizes the profitability and quick turnover potential of fast crops like salad mix. The biology can do a lot of work if you let it.
On the other hand, if you’re not in a hurry, I’ve realized that, when it comes to getting rid of the residue from a previous crop, you can either till or let your soil digest it. This is particularly applicable to some flower and longer crops, where there is no hurry to get rid of them at the end of the crop, because there’s not enough time to plant anything after it.
If there’s no hurry, crops can simply be tarped down to let biology do the rest. I saw this on my visit to Bare Mountain Farm, where they were tarping down a bed of flowers that had gone by at the end of the season without even mowing it. Why go to the trouble if you don’t have to? Since they wouldn’t use the bed again until the next year, they knew their thriving soil biology would break down the residue of the previous crop with almost no work on their part.
No-Till Makes It Almost Irrelevant How Bad Your Soil Is
A common theme I noticed in the interviews was that farmers were able to grow on very poor soils by mulching heavily and building soil up, and able to grow on sloping land because they don’t have to worry about getting a tractor stuck. I got both of these insights from my interview
with Mossy Willow Farm when Mikey told me Paul Kaiser of Singing Frogs Farm’s advice to him: “When working no-till on a clay soil, farm above the clay.” And then Mikey told me how there aren’t many vegetable growers in their area; they’re surrounded by vineyards. I realized that no-till was allowing Mossy Willow to farm on clay on a hillside, not normally prime agricultural land.
It’s very important to be able to work on less-than-perfect agricultural soils, in order to have a decentralized, localized farming system. By building your own soil up on top of the existing poor soil, you should be able to farm almost anywhere.
Skipping Tillage Makes It Easier to Increase the Amount of OM in Soil
Since tillage burns up OM, simply skipping it will make it easier to build soil OM. In addition to sequestering carbon, higher levels of soil OM have a long list of benefits, including promoting soil life and nutrient cycling and increasing the infiltration and water-holding capacity of soils. Higher OM soils are more resistant to extremes of moisture— they hold more water during a drought, absorb water more quickly after rain, and are less prone to washing away in a heavy rain than plowed soils. There are a lot of reasons to want increased organic matter if your soils are low.
Reducing Tillage Should Also Reduce Weeding
Though some growers interviewed claimed more of a benefit from this than others, most of them saw reduced weed pressure over time the longer ground went un-tilled. The less they stirred up the weed seed bank in the ground, the fewer weeds came up, though of course there are always weeds that blow or are tracked in....
Gets You on the Ground More Quickly in Spring
A number of interviewees told me about being able to get on their fields in spring before their neighbors, or even farm all winter long in milder areas since they didn’t have to get a tractor on the field for cultivation. This is a big advantage when it comes to early crops, keeping employees through the winter, and having a diverse array of vegetables and flowers for much of the year.
Environmental Benefits
There are a number of environmental benefits that stem from adopting organic no-till growing practices, including reducing the amount of pollution from farm machinery, reducing off-gassing CO2 and erosion from tillage, and increasing carbon sequestration.
Reduced Necessity for Mechanization
The fact that most of these systems aren’t dependent on having a tractor or other heavy machinery will make farming more enjoyable if you don’t like driving, fixing, fueling, or hearing equipment. That said, if you love your tractor AND no-till methods, you could use the roller-crimper method or use tractors to scale up one of the other no-till methods.
In Closing, as you can see, there are quite a few convincing reasons for why no-till farming methods make sense. All of these methods are also applicable to home gardeners who want to save time and energy in their backyard gardens.
This blog post is excerpted from The Organic No-Till Farming Revolution by Andrew Mefferd. We thank New Society, a publishing company dedicated to positive change through ecological integrity, for permission to excerpt.
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