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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] No-Tillage Crop Production: A Revolution in Agriculture!
  • Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:53:05 -0600


No-Tillage Crop Production: A Revolution in Agriculture!
G. B. Triplett, Jr.a and Warren A. Dickb,*

a Dep. of Plant and Soil Scineces, Mississippi State Univ., Mississippi
State, MS 39762
b School of Environment and Natural Resources, Ohio State Univ.–OARDC, 1680
Madison Ave., Wooster, OH 44691-4096

© 2008 American Society of Agronomy
http://agron.scijournals.org/cgi/content/full/100/Supplement_3/S-153

Full Text (PDF)
http://agron.scijournals.org/cgi/reprint/100/Supplement_3/S-153

ABSTRACT
For thousands of years, agriculture and tillage were considered synonymous.
It was simply not thought possible to grow crops without first tilling the
soil before planting and for weed control. The advent of modern herbicides
permitted no-tillage (NT) to be developed and practiced on actual working
family farms. No-tillage is generally defined as planting crops in unprepared
soil with at least 30% mulch cover. Adoption of NT after its successful
demonstration in the 1950s was slow. However, with better planters,
herbicides, and accumulated experience, NT began to be widely adopted in the
1980s in the United States and then in Australia, South America, and Canada.
Today, approximately 23% of the total cropland in the United States is
planted using NT. No-tillage has revolutionized agricultural systems because
it allows individual producers to manage greater amounts of land with reduced
energy, labor, and machinery inputs. At the same time, NT is a very effective
erosion control measure and improves water and fertilizer use efficiency so
that many crops yield better under NT than under tilled systems. Tillage,
like crops, can be rotated but the benefits of NT are most likely to be
realized with continuous application. We review some of the early work that
led to the development of NT and how NT impacts the crop, soil, hydrology,
and farm economics. While highly sustainable, there are still many challenges
that remain for researchers to solve so the benefits of NT can be realized on
expanded land area and for more crops, worldwide.

entire article
http://agron.scijournals.org/cgi/content/full/100/Supplement_3/S-153







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