No till

Hey Eli. how are you? Why no-till? Why use chemicals? Sorry im just curious and dont know much about farming but am keen to learn all.
😀

I talked to Jeff Moyer from the Rodale institute this weekend about organic no-till using a roller-crimper. He knows a few Amish farmers using the Roller-crimper with horses. The system is tricky, but you could probably cover a lot more ground with the crimper than with a plow. I’d be surprise if a good team couldn’t do over 10 acres in a day.
The system has a lot of tricks to it, but if you manage those, it would make it much more feasible to farm a lot of ground with horses and without chemicals (or with far less chemicals). The consensus is that this system is a lot easier to adopt for beans than corn.

A couple of links:
http://www.croproller.com/models-prices
http://rodaleinstitute.org/our-work/organic-no-till/

Ben

Hi Jared,
A couple of points that I’ve heard from the various researchers
-Make sure the rye is shedding pollen before you crimp. (Vetch is a little harder to judge, but it needs to be near full flower.)
-You don’t necessarily need a roller-crimper to do this, indications are that a sickle-bar mower works just as well. The main advantages of the roller crimper are that the plants are still attached to the ground, and thus a clog is much less likely to build up in a no-till planter, the mulch is more even, and the roller-crimper has a lower draft.

Keep in touch about how this works out.

Hi andy,
I can’t speak about this from experience, but I’ve talked to a handful of researchers and a couple of farmers about it pretty in depth. So, don’t take my word too seriously. We plow our rye in the spring, for a number of different reasons. If the rye gets too tall, its hard to plow it well, and when its around 2 feet tall, its really tenacious.

However, interestingly, I’m pretty sure that this whole system depends on the rye getting WAY away from you. Most of the time, farmers are rolling/mowing rye that is 5-6 ft tall, sometimes taller. At this point, when the rye is shedding pollen, it is pretty much physiologically incapable of regrowing after disturbance. Joel Gruver at University of Western Illinois has actually gotten a pretty reliable kill simply by driving over the cover crop with a no-till drill.

I think the middle-ground is the hardest with rye. ex: The Nordells either keep rye really short with mowing and plow it when it is no more than a couple inches tall, or they let it get really tall and kill it with only a disc. For us, it would be hard to wait that long some years. I think its worth a try on a small plot where you can afford to wait.

was reading about the planker previously posted by ben and came across the implement called a ‘lister’. seems like some good ideas could be borrowed from the lister (images below) to create a simple drill that could open up a furrow in a cover of rye straw. more of a plowing effect than drilling by design. but i think the essential principle is that it would be very difficult to produce the drilling affect achieved by tractor drills due to their weight and downward force on soil/residue. in my mind the compromise would be to create a minimal tillage effect and maybe achieve greater efficiency…i.e. several ‘lister’-type implements in a gang would be lighter and cover more ground than a true no-till drill which would be heavier and require more draft per row. not sure what consequences this would have for weed suppression as you would be exposing more bare soil w/o straw mulch. add raker teeth to the back in a V shape to re-cover seed furrow with straw mulch?

http://auctionimages.s3.amazonaws.com/11217/22281/14758892.jpg

http://auctionimages.s3.amazonaws.com/11217/22281/14758888.jpg