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Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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  • From: Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Quote context
  • Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:31:40 -0500

I hope we've learned enough to avoid the worst. The fiasco in the Gulf doesn't seem to vindicate that hope, however.

Smiles.
Tommy

On 6/17/10 2:49 PM, Tradingpost wrote:
I don't mean to sound harsh but Logsdon isn't the brightest bulb in the room. There he takes a
misused and misunderstood term and ridicules the poorest examples of what's mistakenly called
"no-till". In propaganda studies (my major in those easy college days) it's called the
"straw man argument". I'd like to believe he just doesn't understand and he's too set
in his ways to change.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

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

On 6/17/2010 at 11:28 AM Tommy Tolson wrote:

Published Jun 16 2010 by OrganicToBe.org
<http://organictobe.org/2010/06/16/no-till-is-a-big-white-lie/>,
Archived Jun 16 2010


"No till" is a big white lie

by Gene Logsdon

This will sound like criticism of industrial grain and soybean farmers
but if you read to the end, it is really commiseration. "No till," for
those of you who are not up to the minute on farming, is a popular term
coined by farm technologists to refer to planting crops without working
up a loose, fine seedbed beforehand. The original idea was to plant
seeds using a special "no-till" planter, in undisturbed sod killed with
a herbicide, or into last year's undisturbed plant residue, particularly
cornstalks, thereby reducing erosion. It took lots of herbicides to make
it work but that's another story.

There are still some fields planted this way and they do decrease
erosion. But most of the time, "no till" is a big fat fib. What it
really means is "no moldboard plow" and because of that we are supposed
to believe that farmers are controlling soil erosion. Instead of the
plow, farmers work up the soil with a variety of disks, chisel plows,
field cultivators and turbo tillage tools. When I point out that they
are tilling the soil as much as they ever did, in fact more in some
cases, with just about as much subsequent soil erosion, they look at me
blandly, like I am speaking a foreign language. They don't want to hear
that. They are determined to believe, along with their university and
USDA partners, that they are controlling erosion simply because they
quit using moldboard plows and use no-till planters.

The pretension reaches hilariously ludicrous proportions. For instance,
in "Farm and Dairy" magazine in the latest issue, there is an article
titled: "No-till All the Way." Immediately above it is a photo of the
farm where no-till is being practiced "all the way." In the photo,
behind the farmstead buildings, stretch acres and acres of soil as
tilled and bare as a desert. In the body of the article, the text goes
on for two columns singing the praises of "no-till" farming until it
finally gets down to the truth of the matter and points out that, oh by
the way, the farm uses a Case Turbo 330 tillage tool to cultivate rather
than a moldboard plow.

In truth, these alternatives to the plow sometimes do control erosion a
little better, but not much. What is going on here is definitely not "no
till." It could just as well be called "more till." Farmers are even
returning to fall tillage and in the spring may go over the soil being
prepared for corn with two or more cultivations before planting. But as
long as they don't use a moldboard plow they can call it "no-till."

All you have to do is drive through the cornbelt this time of year to
see thousands upon thousands of acres of unprotected soil planted to
corn that is eroding badly in this year's torrential rains. Even where
soybeans have been planted into corn stalk residue, the residue has been
chopped up and pulverized with cultivation ahead of planting and erosion
occurs there too, but not as bad. Where true no-till is being practiced,
that is where the soybeans are planted directly into heavy, undisturbed
corn stubble, better erosion control is achieved, but there is a
problem. These stalks, mostly from new genetically engineered varieties,
are thick and stout and resistant to rotting. So although they help
control erosion if left undisturbed, they are too much of a good thing
in this regard. They gum up the planter and hold moisture so well that
in this wet weather some such fields have not yet been planted (as of
June 10). They won't dry out enough before the next rain.

But when I grumble, I must first look in the mirror. I grow hardly a
half acre of corn in narrow strips, with clover between the strips, on
land that is almost level. I plow down (mea culpa) a thick growth of
clover for green manure and then rotary-till to mix all that organic
matter and plant residue in the top four inches of soil. I piously think
of myself as being without sin in the erosion department. Guess what. On
one of my corn strips, only 12 feet wide and about 400 feet long, there
is, half way down one strip, a six inch gully created by a rain so heavy
it melted a salt block in the pasture nearby.

Sometimes I think there is no escape from our fate. Willingly or
unwillingly, humans are destroyers of nature. As long as we disturb soil
on any kind of scale beyond the backyard garden, no matter how good our
intentions, we will follow the path of all lost civilizations. Our
fields will turn to deserts, our seas to zones of death.



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