[Food Production] No-till crops

skyemoor · Posted: Tue Aug 07, 2007 10:18 am Post subject: [Food Production] No-till crops

(renaming this thread per discussion with Pops)

No-till farming is really taking off as of late; there has been much activity in the standard pesticide/Roundup, but organic methods are starting to explode, as noted on this New Farm page.

Here are plans for a do-it-yourself no-till roller and a forum to discuss it.

Learn how to select cover crops and contact farmers and extension agents who are practicing (predominantly organic) no-till methods.
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Pops

Thanks Sky I hadn't been there in a while to see the new articles.
This study compares soil moisture between rolling, spraying and rolling/spraying at half label rate.

An incomplete kill seems to be the big problem, decreasing soil moisture as the cover continues growing. It looks like good planning of which cover to plant for which cash crop is key. Matching the best time to roll the cover with the right time to plant the crop.

I was suprised to read somewhere over 90 million acres in Latin America use some type of killed cover planting
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Make a plan and work it:

Pops

Bump
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Make a plan and work it:

Pops

Horse Drawn 3 pt. implements:

http://www.carthorsemachinery.com/index.html
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Make a plan and work it:

RedStateGreen

Very interesting!
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Move my piece right off the board

Hagakure_Leofman

People! Consider the Yeomans plow system. I posted about this with no interest...

It's an extraordinary plow system that yields multiple benefits for farming. The keyline plow effectively lifts the soil beneath the 'hard plate' (created through compaction etc) effectively allowing the soil bed to breath without disturbing the pasture on top. You can also mount a seeder on the device to allow for seeding directly into the fine cut grooves created by the plow. Then, you can plant anything you like directly into the pasture.

Our soils are complex micro-environments that we must protect and enhance. At the farm I studied this, with soil tests, they revealed a 1% to 5% increase in organic matter in a single year on the keyline plowed pastures. That's a massive effort in carbon sequestering on top of a huge increase in soil quality.

Keyline plowing is also performed, usually, along the contours of the landscape, rather than in straight lines along in parallel with fences. [See : Contour Plowing]This creates what basically amounts to small terraces, that slow water runoff and allow greater moisture penetration. This reduced the need to irrigate - especially from groundwater that is clearly unsustainable.

This is what a pasture looks like after a plow.

Ludi

Hagakure_Leofman