[lurk2]

> Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort: you just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil and then dump seed in it. No-till requires things like “tracking the soil’s water retention levels”, “planting cover crops or even giving a field a year off”, and other such steps that in general can be summarized as “cost centers”.

No-Till is one of those ideas like permaculture or Modern Monetary Theory that attracts emphatic advocates while going against conventional practice. It isn’t clear why it would just be being adopted now if it actually worked. Do you have any actual experience farming?

[arthurbrown]

What an odd response. We have centuries of evidence for minimal disturbance agriculture supporting civilizations.

What evidently does NOT work is the quite new practice of industrial tilling and fertilizer, which is causing rapid breakdown of our natural environment and future potential for food production.

[thrownthatway]

What do you mean “does not work”?

The industrial practices that have enable us to feed a population of 8 billion, with surplus - a lot of food is thrown out as waste because we have so much of it we really don’t have to be super strict with it.

The industrial practices that have allowed the majority of the population to do something other than be directly involved in agriculture.

What part of that isn’t working?

The sky is falling, co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks.

We’ve been told these things for, what, at least sixty years now.

Now we can add A.I. will de-employment everyone.

I don’t believe any of it.

[modo_mario]

>co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks.

The insect population is down a ridiculous amount where I live and also in neighboring germany.

I could link the study and such but honestly it's not like these things aren't backed up by my own experiences and those of my parents and grandparents.

I do find a lot lot less insects than I did when i was young. We no longer get much (if any) snow let alone the kneedeep stuff. It's harder to catch certain kinds of fish. The fishing boats where I used to visit every year go quite a bit further nowadays because those fish stocks have collapsed.

[Saline9515]

Tilling with large amounts of mined fertilisers and poisons works for now, but is not especially durable. Many of us are going to discover this given that the fertilisers aren't produced anymore since the Hormuz Strait is blocked.

[arthurbrown]

What's the point of this? You are saying that you will not accept any new information that goes against your belief system.

The evidence is there. Read something. Watch a video. The resources are readily available and abundant.

Make a garden patch and experiment for yourself if you refuse to accept any outside information.

This video is 15 years old. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1aR5OLgcc0

[darkarmani]

> co2 will cook the planet

It doesn't have to cook the planet to cause massive suffering. Do you think there hasn't been global warming? What amount of global warming would change your mind?

[altairprime]

Ideally, industrial farming will use this new data to min/max tilling intervals for higher production per acre, which is still wildly suboptimal but at least provably better than arbitrary downtime practices (or even none) that they would otherwise settle on. If nothing else, that’s language their shareholders will listen to: “use fewer resources to produce more goods” is the holy grail of corporations, and fertilizer must be the death of their opex today.

[lurk2]

Do you have experience as a farmer? If you don’t, why should I believe that farmers who continue to till their fields know less about this issue than you do?

[NanoCoaster]

Because there are other factors at play. No-till is mostly about sustainability of farming. Humans often don't optimize for the most sustainable option but for the option that's most profitable (or perceived to be most profitable) _right now_.

Tilling and using crazy amounts of mineral fertilizer definitely improves yields. But it will, in the long term, also kill agriculture to a large extent if we're not careful. We're not talking about highly speculative outcomes here: The data is pretty clear and everyone with even a large pot and some soil can run the same experiment at home and come to the same conclusions.

Farmers need to survive, they need to earn money, they will obviously optimize for short-term yield. We shouldn't judge them for this, but we _should_ find ways to solve the issue, ideally together with farmers.

[Saline9515]

People in a local optimums don't necessarily know about better local optimums.

[lurk2]

Tillage as a practice has existed for around 10,000 years. I’m supposed to believe that 10,000 years worth of people never figured out that the enormous amounts of energy they were investing into tillage was worse than just doing nothing?

[Saline9515]

Tillage before motorized agriculture was much more superficial. Besides, there are many examples of no-till traditional agriculture, or adjacent versions such as agroforestry.

The no-till experiments started when the destructive effects of deep deep plowing started to appear (e.g dust bowl). It's a clear sign that society realizes that the local optimum isn't sustainable.

No-till is actually quite technical if done right, often requires some level of herbicides or way to cover the soil.

The argument "why didn't we do it before" is moot, before the 19th century midwives didn't wash hands either, why are they even do it now? Right?

[riskable]

10,000 years of feast and famine. Until the enlightenment, people were basically just guessing and sharing anecdotes.

[arthurbrown]

I'm not a farmer, but you are welcome to ask a no-till farmer for their experience, or do some reading. Heck, you could read the article that we're commenting on where scientists have dedicated their career to understanding this stuff.

[lurk2]

Can you explain to me why a farmer with a financial stake in this argument continues to till his soil? Can you explain the benefits of tillage, or are you arguing that it has no benefits?

[inkcapmushroom]

The modern industrial farming complex is designed to treat every field as identical, and to allow as few people as possible to work as big an area as possible. That allows for standardizing methods and optimizing the output per acre. Tilling the soil is mainly for aeration: the farm equipment rolling over the fields (which is needed to massively reduce labor costs) compact them, so you need to loosen the soil again. It's also for weeding; if you till before you plant you uproot any plants already growing there (weeding by hand is extremely labor intensive). It also allows you to mix compost and other beneficial components into your soil to further aerate it and give space for roots to grow. It's all to give your field a "blank canvas" that you apply your crops to, where you can just dump about 2-3x the recommended amount of fertilizer into it and not worry about the particular conditions of the soil itself beforehand.

[ikidd]

We no-till farm thousands of acres in the middle of millions more acres of no-till grain farming. I don't think you have a clue what you're talking about.

[lurk2]

> We no-till farm thousands of acres in the middle of millions more acres of no-till grain farming.

1) Does this practice work in every circumstance?

2) If so, why do farmers continue the practice of tillage?

3) Why did the practice of tillage originate in the first place?

It seems extremely unlikely that the practice was adopted and then continued to persist for no reason.

[bluGill]

Tilling comes in many different forms. The old plow is out nearly everywhere because it is so bad. Debending on local climate and soil some places farmers do some tilling others do none. There are lots of little companies scattered around the world that make a tillage tool for that local area that wouldn't be useful elsewhere if they tried to sell it.

[ikidd]

There are circumstances and soil types that encourage tillage, usually dealing with water. Organic farming trades spray for diesel fuel. And farmers don't like change, but no-till is so ubiquitous that it's hard to find farms that till unless it's unavoidable, such as fixing problems from harvest time.

[altairprime]

No, I don’t particularly care if the solution is cover crops, no tilling, a mix of both, or some other practice entirely (‘introduce groundhogs’ comes to mind as a particularly inflammatory option for mycelial networking). Advocacy for any single solution is not particularly interesting to me, so long as any practice is followed besides “dump imported nitrogen into the hopper each year until your waterways are toast”. (I am not your farmer, this is not farming advice.)