<I'm just curious: is it possible that this campaign against tillage is
<part of the pesticide industry effort to sell herbicides?>
It may have been at first, but in the district where I was the district ag-rep,
the no-till/low-till guys who'd been doing it for a while generally used less
chemical than anybody else. If they survived the first couple of years, they
learned how to walk their fields, map their fields & widen rotations to reduce
weed problems systemically. The no-till guys also used half-rates, one third
rates & spot applications when they did spray. They also chose more competitive
varieties & tinkered combine settings to maximize crop residue (we usually call
that mulch on this list). After 10 years of no-till, they usually had more
organic matter, less weeds, less disease problems than their neighbours & maybe
even a few worms!
When I said to one fellow that he had a lot in common with organic farmers, he
was insulted but that doesn't change the reality. All in all, the no-till guys I
have come into contact with usually regard weedy corners as an indication of a
problem requiring a program (rotation change, seeding timing, more competitve
variety, residue mngmt etc). Thats very different from what conventional farming
has come to be: "Tell me what to spray & how much"
<After nearly 10,000 years of tilling the soil, I would imagine farmers would
have
<known if it made the soil less productive.>
Tillage per se does not make soil less productive, but the wrong tillage at the
wrong time on the wrong soil can lead to destructive erosion. In large portions
of n Africa & s. Europe that were once productive ag zones during the Roman
empire there is barren desert today. The causes were complex (monoculture,
warfare, punitive taxation, corporate farming etc). The farmers did know that
their land had become unproductive so they simply abandoned
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