All forms of tillage — even no-till — move soil. All forms have perks, but some have more drawbacks than others.
Resides In: West Des Moines, Iowa Background Gil Gullickson grew up on a Langford, South Dakota, century farm that he today owns. In 2005, Gil joined Successful Farming to cover agronomy and associated topics. This expanded from magazine and website coverage to podcasts and television. Oversaw agronomy and related topic coverage for Successful Farming. This included Successful Farming magazine, Agriculture.com, and the Successful Farming TV Show and podcasts. S Tine Plow Tip
Vertical-tillage is a good tool for farmers who want to till, yet still preserve residue. Like all tools, though, it has limitations.
"In 2011, we dealt with a flood, and there were southwestern Manitoba areas that were typically no-till," says Marla Riekman, a soil management specialist with Manitoba Agriculture's ag resource branch who spoke at this week's virtual Soil Management Summit (SMS). "People were in a panic about how they were going to deal with (plant into) all this residue and wet soils and they didn't know what to do. So, they started trying vertical-tillage."
"People would say, 'You know, I can run it through water,'" she says. "Well, just because you can do it doesn't mean it's a good idea."
In one case, an equipment dealer demonstrated how to vertically till heavy and excessively wet soils.
"The person who ran the farm said, 'I'm glad I don't have to take this home and clean it up because it was an absolute mess," says Riekman. "It clodded up the soil, leaving these hard clods all over the surface."
"Everything has a limitation," she says. "Make sure that you work within that limitation."
That anecdote fits the plethora of choices that exists for farmers when deciding to no-till, till, or pursue hybrid choices like strip-till. Riekman and Jodi DeJong-Hughes, a University of Minnesota Extension educator, gave these tips at the SMS.
Still, some tillage strategies move a lot more soil than others do.
"The more tillage you do, the more it can impact things," says DeJong-Hughes. "Soil that is not well aggregated can break apart and blow away very easily. So, the more tillage you do, the easier the soil is to move."
This shatters soil structure and leaves soils prone to erosion, she says, leaving only 10% to 15% residue on top. Moldboard plowing also fuels loss of soil carbon that escapes into the atmosphere. This lost carbon deprives the soil of a way to build organic matter that benefits soil in myriad ways, from boosting water infiltration to better using nutrients.
The minus is that the soil is being thrown further, which can shatter structure and spur erosion.
No-tilling has worked on a field south of Winnipeg with heavy clay soils for nearly 20 years, Riekman says.
"The reason it has been successful is that the farm manager went in with a plan that he wanted to no-till," says Rickman. "He actually sprayed out an area of alfalfa that had been in there for three or four years and direct seeded into it. He used alfalfa as a transition crop to move into a no-till system because the alfalfa created the internal drainage that allowed the water to move down. His soil actually adapted very easily to no-till."
522 Tiller Blade "When you see those soils crack in the summertime, you are doing deep-tillage without having a ripper go through," says DeJong-Hughes. In some cases, cracks up to 4 feet deep can occur in those soils during those summertime days — something that would be impossible to do via deep tillage.