no-till agiriculture

[bivol]

Hi yal!

well, this is about growing crops under mulch.
i wonder do any of the draft animal enthusiasts practice these methods using animal power? recently no-till has become quite popular even on large scale farms, so i wonder if it could be neatly adopted for animal use?

thought since plowing is not only one of the most difficult tasks on animals, but is also inverts layers of soil and bacteria to layers they’re not suited for, killing them.
mulch also prevents soil from drying out and light to penetrate and kill the bacteria living in the soil.

ofcourse i dont support total herbicide practices often associated with mulching!

wonder if it would be possible to “pull this off” organically? Fukuoka suceeded.

the biggest problem i’d associate with mulching is that if you plant, say, wheat on the same field for more than i think one year, its’ surviving straw mulch can contain fungus or insects that could spread. guess one could lessen this danger by letting the sraw decompose by putting clover in (it adds nitrogen which bacteria need to tear down carbohydrate sraw stalks, and it also acts like living mulch), and cut in spring aster planting wheat it so the newly sprouted wheat gets a head start…. the clover would also help the wheat because it fixes nitrogen. idea, but still i have too little knowledge on this.

what do you think?

[Andy Carson]

I am attempting to do minimum tillage on a small scale with animal power. I have had successes and failures with it so far. Dealing with crop trash is a challange. By my estimation, most old-time animal powered implements work best either following a plow or when there is little residue for some other reason (such as following a crop that degrades fast). For me, this has meant alot of tools and techniques had to be invented or adapted to some extent. This is kinda fun, but the learning curve is steep this way. I do think that the min-till system I have used has been really good for growing cover crops. The growth of my cover crops was more vigorous than my neighbors fall planted grain (planted at the same time), despite him using a drill and my using a broadcast spreader. I like to think that the residue left on the top of my soil helped to retain moisture and nutrients and this helped the cover crops. But really, there are too many variables to know for sure. Overall, I think this technique has alot of potential and I will be interested to see how it pans out with a variety of crops this year. As an asside, I think if one was willing to use herbicides that tractor based system no-till system would be easier to follow. I have personally never been interested in this path though… There is alot of good information out there about no till and min till. I do think min-till is more adaptable to organic animal based production than no-till, but I am certainly not an expert.

[sickle hocks]

@bivol 24889 wrote:

Fukuoka suceeded.

…that’s the guy who wrote the ‘One Straw Revolution’ for those who haven’t ran into him yet…

Intensive grazing might be an option to terminate cover crops and reduce residues while retaining nutrients on the land.

I’ve wondered about the ATV sized ground drive food plot seeders…maybe they would work for zero till? But they are expensive. There are a bunch of them out there, it seems like quite a scene..like the ‘firminator’ from this company….

http://www.modernhabitatsolutions.com

I’m thinking that if I build up organic matter and aggregate stability, I’ll have a soil that will be more tolerant of some moderate tillage

http://www.producer.com/Crops/Article.aspx?aid=30908

…I will try to stay away from plowing though.

[Andy Carson]

I think I am mostly sceptical of pure no-till in animal powered organic production because I have a hard time imagining how weed control will be performed. Cleverly chosen covers and rotations do alot to smother weeds, but I think there will always be a few “escapees” that need dealt with one way or another. I have had good luck controlling weeds prior to planting with a disc (after some modifications), but I call this minimal tillage rather than no-till. One thing that I learned doing this last year, was that often times, you will make one pass (or several passes) over a piece of ground and think that you haven’t done much. A couple days later, though, you can go back and see you did indeed kill the weeds. It’s a major mental shift from when I worked on a tractor farm and you would have to be braindead to not be able to tell the difference between the black ground you have been over and the light brown dusty ground you haven’t been through yet. That residue, for all it’s good attributes, does block your vision!

[Tim Harrigan]

If you are not using any chemical weed control and want to minimize the amount and type of tillage you are doing there is no question that weed control is going to be your biggest challenge. Mulches can work well in some situations but they don’t always work well so you have to have a plan B and a plan C and be flexible in your approach. There is a good extension bulletin available from Michigan State University “Integrated Weed Management: Fine Tuning the System”. Not sure how much it costs, it is 130 pages and covers a lot of options. I think it would be a good investment if you are interested in farming in this way. Order information at http://www.emdc.msue.msu.edu

Search for extension bulletin E3065. It is $14 plus shipping.

[Andy Carson]

Another very useful resource for me has been media from the Nordell’s (I have attached a thread below). One thing I really like about thier techniques is that they were all designed to be performed with animals from the ground up. They sell a great video (mentioned in the thread) that I highly recommend. Thier systems are based more around vegetable production than the field crops I grow, and they rotate thier ground between cover crop one year and vegetables the next. The levels of weed control they achieve with their techniques are impressive, but it takes half the ground out of production. I am betting that if one is clever about selecting weed resistant field crops, one can get a useful crop every year, despite a few weeds. This might be challenging if one was purely interested in vegetables, but many useful traditional crops (such as buckwheat, field peas, etc) are weed competative and are often used as cover crops. I see no reason why one couldn’t harvest them as well.
http://www.draftanimalpower.com/showthread.php?t=2928&highlight=nordell

[sickle hocks]

Not to minimize the weed problem in any way, but I don’t think a few weeds are a problem, as long as they don’t impact yield significantly or make harvest difficult…if the integrated management techniques get the crop ahead so it is the dominant species in the community then a few escapees can be lived with and may even have a role to play. This is a shift from the clean fields conventional farmer mindset that i am trying to get my head around…And it might not go so well with the neighbours…

This thread got me wondering if there was such a thing as a horse-drawn rod weeder…..guess it was a silly question, of course there is, it was first conceived as a horse implement in 1929, george morris….

http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM6YPX_Morris_Rod_Weeder_Yorkton_SK

Now if only I could find one. Apparently he made the first ones in his garage, so maybe we need to buck up and do the same….has anyone out there used one?

[near horse]

Haven’t used a rod weeder but there are plenty of old ones scattered around here. I thought one of the issues with No-Till (in a conventional sense) is the weight of the drill to get decent seed/soil contact in untilled ground. Those things are beasts as well as pricey – so we try and adapt something.

An interesting crop that’s getting some attention here is camelina. It’s an oil seed that is as tough as weed. Tolerates dry ground, no or few pests etc. Only the seed is about the smallest I’ve ever seen – like 6 or 8 would be equal to one mustard seed. Sorry to diverge – carry on.

[Mac]

Before I start, I just want to say that I personally turn my ground over knee deep twice a year. This is just personal preference, but it also requires more work, because I have to cultivate 2 or 3 times per season.
However, my neighbor found a nice, small drill, and we used it to plant several acres of winter wheat for him. I was suprised at how well the little thing did. I did not like how the weeds came up in it though. I guess if one could figure out a way to prevent this, then it would be ok, for me at least. My OCD does not allow weeds in my fields. 😀
Still and all, I suppose it comes down to personal preference.
Mac

[Andy Carson]

In Gene Logdon’s book “Small-Scale Grain Raising” (another excellent resource), he mentions that weed control is the primary challenge that small scale organic farmers will face with wheat. I find this especially interesting in that other small grains that I have used (oats and rye) seem so weed competative in my hands. I have not grown wheat on my ground, but am curious if there are heirloom varieties that might be more weed competative. Perhaps these varieties got left behind in the pursuit of ever higher yields??? That’s alot of speculation on my part… Interestingly, Logdon also mentions the possibility of planting wheat as a row crop to enable cultivation. Apparently, this is a old Chinese practice, and I can see that weed control would be easier this way. I plan to plant peas as a row crop this year (rather than the more typical solid planting). Similar concept, I’ll have to see how it works…

[near horse]

Hi Andy,

See if you can get hold of Erik Andrus. Erik has hand planted and weeded wheat using the old Chinese method you mention. Conventional practice is to plant at higher densities so as to shade out weeds earlier in the growing season but then the cultvation option is out. Erik would have good info for you.

BTW- he’s also working with some old varieties of wheat.

[sickle hocks]

From what I’ve read the oats, and especially the rye are pretty competitive. Red Fife is the heritage wheat that people are excited about around here, the artisan bakers love it…not sure if it’s more aggressive than a modern wheat.

What about intercropping? Would red clover sown into wheat help smother some weed competition? Maybe clover sown after a really light pre-emergent (of the wheat) tillage with a light harrow to hit the annual weeds. Bonus nitrogen and stand diversity. Oats and peas are supposed to work well. I would like to experiment in this direction.

I bet wheat would follow well after your bean row crops in the rotation as you would have established some good weed control right at the start…i bet that’s half the battle…

[bivol]

hey people, sorry to chip in so late!

Fukuoka actually rotated THREE species of grass family – rice and “winter wheat” (barley and wheat), so he could keep the straw deseases in check.

also, with tilling, one also makes weed seeds resurface. with no-till agriculture, since one doesn’t invert the soil, the seeds get burried and stay down. it’s a matter of what grows faster – wheat & clover, or weeds.

right, for seding thy used little clay balls mixed with manure and seeds which they’d scatter through the fields, so no real need to even touch the ground, according to mr. Fukuoka.

although he himself said that practices would have to be different according to climate.

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