Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

A little logic. The effects of tillage versus no-till are the same
regardless of herbicide use. The ill effects of herbicides and/or other
chemicals are bad whether till or no-till is practiced. Apples and oranges.


paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 12/14/2007 at 4:55 PM Marty Kraft wrote:

>Paul
>
>I sent this article to a friend and am including his response in this
>email. Are we talking about commercial no-till vs an organic no-till
>methods here? My friend raises organic wheat and is conscientious in
>his work.
>
>Marty,
>
>You had better check your facts on this. The way no-till makes the
>grade is by cheating on the soil tests. The main reason that KSU is
>behind this is to sell new farm equipment and make a name for mr.
>Charles Rice. There is more research showing that organic farming
>will sequester more carbon than ANY other form of farming. And
>another point, the no-till idea does NOT take into account the CO2
>that gets released during the manufacturing of nitrate fertilizer. Of
>course, organic does not use manufactured fertilizer.
>
>On Dec 10, 2007, at 6:16 PM, TradingPostPaul wrote:
>
>>
>> NO-TILL FARMING OFFERS A QUICK FIX TO HELP WARD OFF HOST OF GLOBAL
>> PROBLEMS
>> http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/notill.htm
>>
>> COLUMBUS, Ohio – Increase no-till farming practices across the
>> planet or
>> face serious climate, soil quality and food production problems in
>> the next
>> 20 to 50 years. That warning from scientists appeared in the journal
>> Science this week.
>> Rattan Lal
>>
>> No-till farming helps soil retain carbon. Healthy topsoil contains
>> carbon-enriched humus – decaying organic matter that provides
>> nutrients
>> to plants. Soils low in humus can't maintain the carbon-dependent
>> nutrients
>> essential to healthy crop production, resulting in the need to use
>> more
>> fertilizers.
>>
>> A lack of carbon in soil may promote erosion, as topsoil and
>> fertilizers
>> are often washed or blown away from farm fields and into waterways,
>> said
>> Rattan Lal, the paper's lead author and the director of the carbon
>> management and sequestration center at Ohio State University.
>>
>> In no-till agriculture, farmers plant seeds without using a plow to
>> turn
>> the soil. Soil loses most of it carbon content during plowing, which
>> releases carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere. Increased levels
>> of CO2 in
>> the atmosphere have been associated with global climate change.
>>
>> "If every farmer who grows crops in the United States would use no-
>> till and
>> adopt management practices such as crop rotation and planting cover
>> crops,
>> we could sequester about 300 million tons of soil carbon each year."
>>
>> Traditional plowing, or tilling, turns over the top layer of soil.
>> Farmers
>> use it for, among other reasons, to get rid of weeds, make it
>> easier to use
>> fertilizers and pesticides and to plant crops. Tilling also
>> enriches the
>> soil as it hastens the decomposition of crop residue, weeds and other
>> organic matter.
>>
>> Still, the benefits of switching to no-till farming practices outweigh
>> those of traditional planting.
>>
>> Since the mechanization of agriculture began a few hundred years ago,
>> scientists estimate that some 78 billion metric tons – more than 171
>> trillion pounds – of carbon once trapped in the soil have been lost to
>> the atmosphere in the form of CO2.
>>
>> Lal and his colleagues estimate that no-till farming is practiced
>> on only 5
>> percent of all the world's cultivated cropland. Farmers in the United
>> States use no-till methods on 37 percent of the nation's cropland,
>> which
>> results in saving an estimated 60 million metric tons of soil CO2
>> annually.
>>
>> "If every farmer who grows crops in the United States would use no-
>> till and
>> adopt management practices such as crop rotation and planting cover
>> crops,
>> we could sequester about 300 million tons of soil carbon each
>> year," said
>> Lal, who is also a professor of soil science at Ohio State.
>>
>> "Each year, 6 billion tons of carbon is released into the planet's
>> atmosphere as fossil fuels are burned, and plants can absorb 20
>> times that
>> amount in that period of time," he said. "The problem is that as
>> organisms
>> decompose and plants breathe, CO2 returns to the atmosphere. None
>> of it
>> accumulates in the soil."
>>
>> Lal admits that full-scale no-till farming practices are a short-
>> term fix,
>> but it's one that will give researchers enough time to find
>> alternatives to
>> fossil fuels.
>>
>> "There needs to be a global effort to adopt no-till farming
>> practices soon.
>> Governments need to mandate these practices or to provide financial
>> incentives to farmers to adopt them," said Lal, adding no-till
>> methods may
>> reduce a farmer's annual crop yield by 5 to 10 percent, at least
>> for the
>> first few years.
>>
>> It's also tough to ask farmers who lack the necessary financial
>> resources
>> to switch to no-till methods, especially in African and Asian
>> countries
>> where no-till levels are the lowest, Lal said.
>>
>> "No-till isn't readily practiced in most of these areas due to the
>> lack of
>> available financial resources and government support," he said.
>> "Farmers
>> often lack the seeding equipment necessary to drill through crop
>> residue.
>> And many farmers use leftover residue from the previous year's
>> crops for
>> fuel or animal fodder. So the cultivated soil gets compacted or
>> eroded by
>> water and wind."
>>
>> Topsoil is also a lucrative commodity – an acre of it can bring in
>> $1,300
>> for a farmer in India, where the first few feet of soil are often
>> removed
>> for brick making.
>>
>> "No-till farming isn't a substitute for finding alternatives to fossil
>> fuels," Lal said.
>>
>> "No-till is definitely a short-term fix, but it may buy us up to 50
>> years
>> to find alternatives to fossil fuels. If we don't heed this
>> warning, our
>> planet may change drastically. There's no other choice."
>>
>> Lal co-authored the paper with Michael Griffin, Jay Apt, Lester
>> Lave and M.
>> Granger Morgan, all with Carnegie Mellon University.
>>
>>
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