The transplanter being made ready for a day of transplanting broccoli.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
Drive around any rural area in the springtime and you’re likely to see freshly tilled fields being made ready for crops. Tillage is so basic to agriculture it’s a paradigm that is frequently not questioned. We can’t understand no-till systems and why they are advantageous until we put them in the context of tillage and the disadvantages that go along with it.
Tillage is one of the most time, labor, and equipment intensive tasks on the farm. It’s easy to see that a lot of time and effort could be saved if tillage were eliminated. The problem has always been how to prepare the soil for planting without tillage?
“Tilling the soil is the equivalent of an earthquake, hurricane, tornado, and forest fire occurring simultaneously to the world of soil organisms.” What radical, tillage-hating group made such a strong statement? The USDA-NRCS, in a pamphlet entitled “Farming in the 21st Century: A Practical Approach to Soil Health.”
It goes on to say, “Physical soil disturbance, such as tillage with a plow, disk, or chisel plow, that results in bare or compacted soil is destructive and disruptive to soil microbes and creates a hostile, instead of hospitable, place for them to live and work. Simply stated, tillage is bad for the soil.”
Tillage results in two self-perpetuating cycles: it burns up soil OM necessitating the addition of more, and it stirs up weed seeds, necessitating yet more tillage to kill the weeds. Conventional farming “solves” these two problems in a manner that is not sustainable. For depletion of organic matter, it treats the soil as a substrate for holding plants and disregards the depletion of OM. For weeds, it has herbicides.
Organic agriculture offers improvements over conventional bare tillage. Most notably, organic system plans mandate that cover crops be grown between cash crops in order to add some organic matter back to the soil, and to keep the soil covered when it is prone to erosion (over the winter, for example).
Soil has three properties that we are most interested in agriculturally: the physical, the biological, and the chemical. Tillage is bad for all three of them.
On the physical side, the action of tilling crushes the soil structure, making soil more likely to erode and less likely to absorb water efficiently. On the biological side, the action of tilling kills many of the organisms that live in the soil. Tillage breaks apart soil fungi and the aggregates they make that help soil resist erosion and promote water infiltration. Over time, this promotes a soil environment with more bacteria and less fungi.
And on the chemical side, accelerating the oxidization of organic matter promotes a short-term release of fertility, at the expense of the long-term reserves in the soil. Furthermore, the destruction of soil organic matter releases carbon that has been sequestered in the soil into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
In addition to the negative effects on the soil, tillage also wastes a lot of time and energy. On my farm I’ve often thought, “If we didn’t have to spend all this time and energy tilling, we’d save a lot of time and energy.”
Tillage ties up a lot of money, in the form of fuel, labor, and equipment. It also ties up a lot of time, both in the sense of the time that it takes to do the tillage, but also in the sense that other farm operations may be delayed due to tillage. For example, tillage can’t be done when it’s too wet or too dry, so farmers often find themselves waiting for the soil to dry out in the springtime to till, when the temperature is otherwise adequate to plant. If there was a cover crop on the ground before tillage, then you have to wait at least an additional two weeks for it to break down after tilling before planting.
No-till trades tillage for other methods of field preparation that are less complex, strenuous, and time-consuming. It is a less invasive, more efficient, and more profitable field prep process that grows healthy soil in order to grow healthy crops.
According to a USDA fact sheet, “A simple definition of soil health is the capacity of a soil to function. How well is your soil functioning to infiltrate water and cycle nutrients to support growing plants?”13
The two best understood areas of the soil are its physical and chemical properties. It has long been known that the physical condition and chemistry of the soil have a lot to do with the success or failure of crops. Now we know that the biology is very important too, but we still have a lot to learn about the biology of the soil.
Maybe it’s because soil biology was not thought important that conventional systems were designed to operate in spite of whether the soil was healthy or not. Tillage implements crush the soil into plantable submission, chemicals kill anything that might compete with the crop, and chemical fertilizers replace the fertility that was either lost from the soil or was no longer being cycled efficiently by biology. The cumulative effects of these practices are erosion, loss of fertility, and dead, nonfunctioning soil.
Once again, organic systems do better by incorporating cover crops to make up for organic matter destroyed through tillage, and at least by not using all those chemicals. But I have come to think of most tillage systems as having built-in remedies to try and deal with the destruction that they cause.
Conventional systems try to get around degraded soil biology and physics by using chemicals to keep plants productive. Organic tillage-based systems try to promote the biology in spite of the damage they are doing to the soil. Over the course of doing the interviews for this book, I’ve come to think of no-till systems as operating because of soil biology, not in spite of it.
No-till systems have advantages when it comes to promoting a healthy soil system. For one thing, they’re not burning up the soil OM through tillage in the first place, so they don’t have to do the one step forwards/one step backwards dance of tilling and then adding more OM to make up for the tillage you just did. So we can say they make it easier to raise the percentage of OM on your soil test.
In addition to sequestering carbon, increasing OM improves all three aspects of the soil. Higher OM increases the tilth of the soil (physical) and the life in the soil (biological), which will in turn improve the availability of nutrients in the soil (chemical).
Over the course of these interviews I’ve come to see what we used to regard as the least important element of healthy soil as the most important. Let’s go back to our simple definition of soil health as the capacity of a soil to function. In a healthy soil the biology can improve the physical and chemical properties. Thus the organic adage to “feed the soil to feed the crop.” In no-till systems, I’ve seen how the biology is promoted specifically to make the soil texture and chemistry good for growing crops. Good biology builds good soil texture and chemistry.
In conventional systems, the opposite is true. Chemistry is used to make up for poor soil biology, texture, and chemistry. I think some of the systems in this book make the almost perfect “closed loop” system a lot of organic growers are looking for. Four Winds Farm, for example, has been using their system for two decades. They make their own compost, and over time the OM level in their soil has grown high enough that, even though the compost is not particularly high in fertility (by density or fertilizer standards), enough is being made available by biology to feed the plants.
More recently we’ve begun to understand the importance of biology — that it helps cycle nutrients in the soil and develop the aggregation that prevents soil from eroding. But soil biology is an area where we still have a lot to learn.
Let’s go back to our definition of soil health as the capacity of a soil to function, so unhealthy soils are not very functional and healthy soils are highly functional. What chemical agriculture does is make unhealthy, low-functioning soils grow plants with quick hits of chemicals. Which is why conventional agriculture is compared to drug addiction — you’re constantly adding more chemicals to make up for the damage of the previous chemicals, and constantly tilling (or spraying) to kill the weeds whose seeds you churned up the last time you tilled. Tilling more to make up for tilling. Spraying more to make up for spraying.
We need to start thinking of the health of the soil just like we think of the health of a forest, a field, a lake, or even a human community. These all can be self-sustaining ecosystems, with producers, predators, prey, and organisms that sustain them from season to season. In natural systems, or naturally managed agricultural systems, the soil can function as a self-sustaining community. But with frequent tillage, introducing the effects of “an earthquake, hurricane, tornado, and forest fire occurring simultaneously” on the soil ecosystem has the same effects such a cataclysm would have on a human community; not everything dies, but the larger organisms and fungi are disproportionally vulnerable when the physical environment of the soil is destroyed.
Repeated tillage has the same effect on the soil that repeated cataclysms would have on a human community; it throws the soil community into a cycle of constantly being destroyed and rebuilt, favoring the bacteria that survive to feed on those killed by tillage.
Against the drawbacks of tillage we can evaluate the advantages of foregoing tillage. One of the most exciting things about no-till is that, if you already have a farm, you may not need to buy anything or only make a minimal investment to try the methods. Most growers already have what they need to try no-till lying around the farm.
Most tillage systems require at least three passes over the field before they are ready to plant, requiring no less than three different pieces of equipment, and a tractor or horses to pull them with. The no-till systems in this book typically skip the step of tillage by using a mulch that is either left in place or removed to prepare the soil for planting. These mulches require less investment than tillage in every aspect:
• No-till takes less time than tillage
• No-till takes less equipment than tillage
• No-till takes less energy (in the form of tractor or horse power)
• No-till doesn’t burn up organic matter the way tillage does
• No-till should require less work to prepare a field than tillage, with an additional advantage. Tractor work has to take place when a field is sufficiently dry, meaning that in humid regions farmers are at the mercy of the weather to start getting their fields ready in the spring.
On paper this may not seem like a big deal but in practice, getting a late start to the season can have a real impact on profitability and happiness. In a wet spring, farmers are at the mercy of the weather, waiting for fields to dry out. It can be really frustrating to sit and wait as planting dates go by on the calendar and transplants get too big in the greenhouse because the field is too wet to till.
Consider that most no-till systems require no tractor implements, and no tractor. The basic requirements are to smother whatever is growing in a field with some type of mulch (see the individual methods for specifics), fertilize, and plant. While tractors can be handy for moving things around, they are by no means necessary, and several of the no-till farms I visited didn’t even have any.
The transplanter being made ready for a day of transplanting broccoli.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
In a world where large-scale commodity agriculture is given so many advantages through subsidies and other government support, regenerative agriculture needs all the help it can get. People want real food, as shown by the steady growth of farmers markets and organic food sales. The connection between having smaller farms and having more real food available may not at first be apparent, so let’s make it clear: some farm models have a certain size below which they don’t make sense. The size and expense of the infrastructure dictate the expanse of the farm.
No-till stops the equipment from dictating the scale of the farm and lets the farm be the size it wants to be. For example, it doesn’t make sense to buy a $250K tractor to cultivate an acre. It doesn’t even make sense to buy a $25K tractor to cultivate an acre. To cite a personal example, even though we started our farm on three acres, I felt like we needed a tractor, mainly for tillage. So we ended up buying a tractor for our three acres, and it always felt like a bull in a china shop working on our vegetable beds.
Not everyone wants to have a big farm. I want people to feel like they can start a farm whether they have access to a lot of land or money or not. More farms will be started if people can start them on very small acreages with very little investment. Then those who are successful can choose whether to scale up or stay small.
Filled with broccoli transplants.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
I don’t personally have any favoritism about farm size. I think that to increase the amount and access to local food, we need lots more small, medium, and large farms. Realistically though, as someone who wants to see this change take place, I know more people have the resources and management skills to start a small farm than a big one. Lowering the amount of investment and land needed to start a farm is an important way to get more farms started.
Because of the reduced requirement for equipment, no-till enables smaller units of land to be economically viable units.
This is especially important for urban and suburban farms. Most suburban and especially urban areas do not have large uninterrupted tracts of land, and land prices may be high. Reducing the size of the piece of land necessary for a viable commercial farm makes it possible for people to start successful farms on smaller pieces of land. In order to re-localize our food system, we need to have lots of new farms of all sizes everywhere — including where much of the population is concentrated, in cities and suburbs.
Also, a smaller “entry level” size for commercial farms will open up farming to more people. I’ve known a number of people who wanted to farm but could not afford the investment in land or equipment. Reducing the necessary footprint size increases the number of people who can start farms. And more small farms means more farms of all sizes. Because some people who start small farms will scale them up to medium and large farms. And what we need is more farms of all sizes everywhere.
Taking a break from transplanting.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
As in any industry, economy of scale is often used to increase efficiency in farming. Alas, by definition economies of scale are not available to small farms. The cumulative effect of the efficiencies of no-till enables one to run a commercially viable, living-wage farm on a very small footprint. So a farmer doesn’t feel like they have to grow on a large acreage in order to make a living.
The no-till growers I visited with saw OM levels go up quickly after adopting no-till practices. Increasing OM in the soil makes plants grow better for a lot of different reasons, so it is a best practice of farming to try and increase OM over time. Cover cropping and adding compost are best practices because in addition to adding nutrients to the soil, they tend to increase soil OM.
In addition to grinding and incorporating whatever is growing in the soil where a crop needs to go, the churning of tillage burns up OM and in the process releases nutrients. So tillage systems need to add OM every year in order to make up for what they burn up during tillage, just to maintain equilibrium and stay at a constant level. Which is why no-till growers see a rapid rise in OM after adopting no-till methods — they are building soil without the burning up of OM that occurs during tillage.
The beauty of these methods is their simplicity; some of them could be explained in a sentence. Deep mulching with compost, for example, could be boiled down to: Apply a thick enough layer of weed-free compost to suppress weeds, and then plant into it. Of course, more information than that is helpful to get started, since the devil (and the success) is in the details. That’s why there are summaries of the methods later on in the introduction, and the real nitty-gritty details in the interviews.
One advantage: It’s not rocket science! Really, the only reason we need a whole book about it is to cover all the different methods.
Along with their simplicity, no-till methods should result in a reduction in mechanization and the complications that go along with it: owning equipment, fixing it, fueling it, and the emissions it produces. I used to think that tractors were a necessary evil, but no-till made me realize they’re not necessary for having a profitable farm.
With less space devoted to paths, turnarounds, and headlands for equipment, farms can be more productive because more of the space is devoted to growing crops. For most of those systems using permanent beds, fertility can be concentrated on the growing area where it is needed. Seeds can be scattered at higher density than with cultivation because space doesn’t need to be left open for passes of the cultivator.
Making sure everything is working right. Once we got going, we could transplant very quickly into a high-residue bed that crimping produces.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
Because time doesn’t have to be taken to till between crops, many no-tillers I talked to were able to re-plant a harvested bed within the same day or very quickly after harvest. This maximizes the profitability and quick turnover potential of fast crops like salad mix. The biology can do a lot of work if you let it.
On the other hand, if you’re not in a hurry, I’ve realized that, when it comes to getting rid of the residue from a previous crop, you can either till or let your soil digest it. This is particularly applicable to some flower and longer crops, where there is no hurry to get rid of them at the end of the crop, because there’s not enough time to plant anything after it.
If there’s no hurry, crops can simply be tarped down to let biology do the rest. I saw this on my visit to Bare Mountain Farm, where they were tarping down a bed of flowers that had gone by at the end of the season without even mowing it. Why go to the trouble if you don’t have to? Since they wouldn’t use the bed again until the next year, they knew their thriving soil biology would break down the residue of the previous crop with almost no work on their part. See the interview with Bare Mountain Farm on p. 123.
A common theme I noticed in the interviews was that farmers were able to grow on very poor soils by mulching heavily and building soil up, and able to grow on sloping land because they don’t have to worry about getting a tractor stuck. I got both of these insights from my interview with Mossy Willow Farm (p. 223) when Mikey told me Paul Kaiser of Singing Frogs Farm’s (see interview p. 275) advice to him: “When working no-till on a clay soil, farm above the clay.” And then Mikey told me how there aren’t many vegetable growers in their area; they’re surrounded by vineyards. I realized that no-till was allowing Mossy Willow to farm on clay on a hillside, not normally prime agricultural land.
It’s very important to be able to work on less-than-perfect agricultural soils, in order to have a decentralized, localized farming system. By building your own soil up on top of the existing poor soil, you should be able to farm almost anywhere.
Since tillage burns up OM, simply skipping it will make it easier to build soil OM. In addition to sequestering carbon, higher levels of soil OM have a long list of benefits, including promoting soil life and nutrient cycling and increasing the infiltration and water-holding capacity of soils. Higher OM soils are more resistant to extremes of moisture — they hold more water during a drought, absorb water more quickly after rain, and are less prone to washing away in a heavy rain than plowed soils. There are a lot of reasons to want increased organic matter if your soils are low.
Vegetable rows were interplanted with flowering plants for farmscaping, like this dill, to attract beneficial insects, like these margined leatherwings.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
Though some growers interviewed claimed more of a benefit from this than others, most of them saw reduced weed pressure over time the longer ground went un-tilled. The less they stirred up the weed seed bank in the ground, the fewer weeds came up, though of course there are always weeds that blow or are tracked in....
A number of interviewees told me about being able to get on their fields in spring before their neighbors, or even farm all winter long in milder areas since they didn’t have to get a tractor on the field for cultivation. This is a big advantage when it comes to early crops, keeping employees through the winter, and having a diverse array of vegetables and flowers for much of the year.
There are a number of environmental benefits that stem from adopting organic no-till growing practices, including reducing the amount of pollution from farm machinery, reducing off-gassing CO2 and erosion from tillage, and increasing carbon sequestration.
The fact that most of these systems aren’t dependent on having a tractor or other heavy machinery will make farming more enjoyable if you don’t like driving, fixing, fueling, or hearing equipment.
That said, if you love your tractor AND no-till methods, you could use the roller-crimper method or use tractors to scale up one of the other no-till methods.
Rows of broccoli interspersed with various farmscaping treatments in order to measure the amount of beneficials attracted by different treatments.
Credit: Andrew Mefferd
You don’t have the option to erase weeds with a tiller anymore. If they get out of control, you can’t mechanically cultivate anymore. You have to stay on top of weeds and keep them from going to seed or they will get out of control with no good means for getting them back under control. This just has to be taken into consideration when planning for no-till.
Any method that has light-colored mulch on the soil in the spring will warm more slowly than bare soil. In fact, some growers using the deep straw mulch method pull the mulch back in the spring to warm the soil before planting. Just keep in mind that soil-cooling mulches are not the method to use for extra-early crops.
On the other hand, this can be an advantage in very hot areas where the soil could benefit from being kept cool. Though not warm in the springtime, mulched land stays warmer later into the fall according to some growers, so under some circumstances it may be a better technique for the end of the season than the beginning.
Slugs and snails can become a problem when there is a lot of undigested organic matter in the soil. Because dead plant matter is what they eat, they will come for the decaying organic matter, and stay for your crop. How to deal with them other than Sluggo? Ideally leave beds uncovered for a few days after occultation before transplanting into, so they retreat. Slugs may be particularly pronounced when you first establish no-till, but the longer you leave the ground undisturbed, their numbers may be reduced over time by ground-dwelling animals like beetles and snakes.