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  • From: Brian <bcluton AT aol.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Zone/strip tillage
  • Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 15:06:15 -0400

There are trade offs with every system.  Reducing tillage when appropriate can certainly be a good thing but it can also be problematic.  It depends on crops and soil to a great degree and most situations and crops will require a good amount of fine tuning.  This season we planted some of our tomatoes into a mowed rye crop, we then ran a coulter and ripper to cut a planting strip.  These toms established more slowly and yielded less for the better part of the season.  Now in the late season however they show less disease pressure and have cleaner more marketable fruit.  We had ok weed control early but by late season the field was loaded with late summer annuals and some perennial patches had grown strong.  It wasn't a totally successful venture but one we will continue to experiment with. We also planted some tomatoes this season on regular bare soil but undersowed with white clover at last cultivation. This piece has been picking nice cleanish fruit and the field is very weed free. The white clover is well established and should provide a good plow down cover.  If you can manage the cover, manage weeds, and facilitate nutrient cycling and simultaneously reduce tillage and increase soil coverage and/or cover cropping periods you'd be crazy not to.  Contrary to Bobs statement you can most definitely hurt the dirt.  The trick is to craft a system that meets soil building goals while still meeting the immediate need of growing high quality cash crops.  The two go hand in hand but not always as gracefully as one might hope.  Sometimes one comes at the expense of the other so we need to merge short term goals with long term soil building practices.

Brian 
Stones Throw Farm
CNY zone 5



On Sep 24, 2010, at 3:05 PM, <sunnfarm AT netscape.com> wrote:

I tried it on 14 acres twice 30 years ago both times I got low to no yields and a lot of weeds. Almost all small seeded vegetables which must be 95% of what we grow like to be planted on a finely tilled seed bed. Despite what the sustainable guru's say... You cant hurt the dirt. Nothing is more satisfying and brings you closer to nature then tilling the soil...Bob.
Sunny Meadow Farm
Bridgeton, NJ

--- nwackett AT yahoo.com wrote:

From: Nigel Wackett <nwackett AT yahoo.com>
To: market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [Market-farming] Zone/strip tillage
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2010 05:23:17 -0700 (PDT)

I'm about to start my first year of production (diversified organic) and am looking at different sustainable cultivation methods. I particularly like the concept of zone, or strip, tillage as you only make one pass to prepare a planting area for a particular crop - you don’t have to plow or disk, saving fuel, time, and enhancing soil quality by not inverting it.

My extension agent says the following: "Strip tillage is practiced widely with field crop producers (commodity crops) and most always requires the use of synthetic herbicides as it uses no mechanical weed control.  Some veg producers have tried tilling out sections of a cover crop and planting into those strips with mixed results."

Does anyone here have any experience with this method?

Thanks,
Nigel Wackett
Frog Belly Farm
Longmont, CO

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