Are We Wrong About Tillage?

[Music] foreign [Music] ER Jesse here so occasionally I see someone comment on one of our videos and say something like you call yourself no-till but your beds look tilled or they see a tool like the rotary plow being used or whatever and they just sort of write off all of our work as bad for the soil or something and that's fine there's no one thing that everyone in the world is going to agree on but it just occurs to me when I see those comments that we are maybe not all operating with the same definition of tillage and I don't expect us to all necessarily ever be on the same page about it but what I want to do practically and scientifically speaking is try to give a better definition to this idea of tillage and the types of practices we should as Growers and gardeners try to avoid and why Dogma is the worst thing you can bring to your garden so let's do it yep no idea where I'm going [Music] first things first if you're not subscribed to this channel make sure to hit the Subscribe button and if you are subscribed you're awesome couple quick things hats are back in stock get them while they last at no-till growers.com also while you're there you can pick up a copy of the living soil handbook or other merch all of those things go to supporting our work or you can always hit the super thanks button and just give us a quick thank you which is awesome I didn't even know about it until recently also awesome all right so although I will hopefully address most of them preemptively over the next few minutes please feel free to leave any thoughts you have and questions in the comments section because I'm not the gatekeeper of the term no-till or living soil or any of it I just want to sort of facilitate the conversation and drink beer relevance is relative so I've talked about this before and I even discuss it a little bit in the living soil handbook but the definition you get generally speaking for tillage when you ask the dictionaries of the world is something like the preparation of land for growing crops or more specifically like the manipulation of the soil into a desired condition by mechanical means or something along those lines essentially you really have to dig Did I just pun you really have to dig to find a definition that declares anything inherently negative about tillage and historically this kind of makes sense when you look at the etymology of the word tillage for instance the word tillage derives from words that mean things like tend and work and aim and strive and cultivate and raise which all largely have positive connotations so if tillage has largely meant to prepare the soil for growing crops for hundreds or even thousands of years in one form or another what happened when preparing the soil for growing crops suddenly industrialized in short order as we added larger and larger tractors capable of larger and larger scales of soil preparation what it meant to prepare the soil for growing crops change from something that perhaps looked more like these shots from Modern Day Indonesia just as an example because it turns out they didn't have drones back in the day anyway it went from something like this to something that looks more like this today and with that scale of tillage came a much greater scale of damage right of erosion of nutrient and chemical each or environmental degradation and habitat destruction so that's where in popular culture the term tillage has sort of developed its negative connotation the reason that something that we're all kind of trying to avoid and I'm not going to try and convince you the term tillage shouldn't have a negative connotation it does and therefore it should as I've said in other videos and in various talks I've given words change meaning all the time and there's nothing wrong with that for a very contemporary example the word friend didn't used to be a verb awful used to describe things that were deserving of awe to be egregious used to be a good thing the word literal is literally changing in front of our eyes even if the dictionaries don't necessarily say so and so returning to our term tillage whether the dictionaries know it or not yet the term tillage has flipped meaning as well so the definition I propose for this term is not like the dictionary's suggestion to prepare the soil for growing crops or something like that to me that frankly comes up quite a bit short but rather the definition I like for tillage is something more to the effect of practices that cause long-term harm to the soil or maybe tillage is approaching soil preparation in a way that causes erosion nutrient and chemical leaching and habitat destruction whatever your definition and feel free to share yours genuinely I'd be curious whatever the definition it should include what we are ultimately trying to avoid by not tilling or through no-till right for me what no-till means is something that doesn't just avoid causing harm right but something that actively Works to improve the state health and function of the soil that makes sense so no-tillas not just Do no harm but rather actively do good things to your soil I.E participate in its health I think the impulse for people is to feel like they need to treat the soil with kid gloves like anything humans do to the soil is bad when the reality is that we are especially equipped as stewards with a unique ability to actively help and prove the soil we can't feed the plants the nutrients they need microbes do that what we can do is make the conditions right for the plant to grow so let's discuss a few practices that exemplify both tillage and no tillage under those sort of proposed definitions starting of course with the most obvious offender the tiller what the tiller does that fits so neatly into our definition of tillage is something that causes long-term harm to the soil is a few different things one it pulverize the soil Aggregates this is a big deal because soil Aggregates are critical for water retention and movement they contain soil organic matter so they are critical for Plant Nutrition as well but when you pulverize them with something like the rototiller or rotavator as they say across the pond oh Vader no relation distant cousins I bet anyway when you pulverize your soil Aggregates you release all that soil organic matter that the various microbes have wrapped up while whipping in a bunch of oxygen at the same time with the tiller oxygen loving bacteria go bananas and start consuming that soil organic matter and releasing the carbon that your plants and microbes worked so hard to store and they release it in the form of CO2 does that make sense they're eating carbonaceous material and they're basically just off-gassing CO2 so in that way much of your soil organic matter gets gobbled up and disappears Into The Ether because plants are not there to reclaim it and keep it in the carbon cycle like they may be in a no-tillage system so that is a long-term harm right but it's not the only long-term harm the tiller also chops up plant roots and fungal hyphae that are keeping the soil in place making the newly loosened soil particles susceptible to erosion from wind rain and muddy boots the tiller also chops up worms and other life forms which can take quite a while to rebound as they have to reconstruct their tunnels and rebuild their populations this is partially why I believe your first year no-till after tilling for a while can be a little underwhelming the soil needs time to repair itself anyway tillage can also cause compaction layers prevent water as well as roots from penetrating deep and storing carbon deep into the soil however does that mean that a tiller or similar tools can never be used for good not necessarily a tiller or something like the rotary plow can be used to incorporate carbonaceous materials into depleted compacted soil leading to faster and more robust photosynthesis for your plants [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] and the faster your plants can get to that point of robust photosynthetic activity the faster your soil will get to good health for more on starting Gardens give this video a watch and I dedicate a whole chapter to it in the living soil handbook so if you don't have that pick it up help support these videos also perhaps the tiller is the ultimate representation of tillage short of a blender attack it could happen I just don't trust those things but the tiller is hardly the only tool that can or does cause long-term harm to the soil right lots of practices can do one or some of the same things to the soil plastic culture for instance can not only cause compaction and potentially deposit microplastics in the soil but can also be a source of soil erosion when removed as soil will be stuck on the plastic itself and then removed to the dump which is not really where you want your soil moreover tillage is not just about what we do to the soil as much as it is about what we don't do for instance leaving the soil bare for long periods or without a mulch or a plant to feed it through photosynthesis can have long lasting negative effects as well few things are worse for the soil than having nothing on it or in it no matter how little disturbance that you're doing I will say this and have said it a thousand times but if the soil is not being fed it is feeding on itself and nothing feeds the soil better than living plant roots you also have to consider that not all disturbance is necessarily tillage because some types of disturbance can lead to way better crop health and thus better soil Health really quickly a broad fork for instance is a great tool for decompacting soil and making it more capable of supporting productive plant life and it's a tool that when used correctly makes itself obsolete because the plant roots will eventually fill out those gaps made by the broadfort and keep the soil from recompacting thanks in effect to the broad Fork are you tearing up some fungal hyphy and plant roots in the process sure but if your intention and goal is to create healthier soil then not addressing the soil compaction or drainage is more of an act of tillage than a white broad forking is I'll bet that one's going to go over really well in the comments but it's true there's too much emphasis on protecting something that isn't really there like we don't want to till the soil because it'll hurt the fungal hyphy but the reality is a lot of soils really compacted soils may not have any fungal hyphy or good organisms in them to begin with that's your job also never forget that the crops we are growing as vegetable Growers as Market gardeners almost all literally are recovery species like that's their job in nature let me repeat that most of the crops we grow are genetically designed by nature for rebuilding Disturbed soil the entire job of all the domesticated plants that we grow for food when they're in the wild is to recover habitats after disturbances from Hogs or fires or strip malls that is largely the role of most annual plants to get a disturbed soil covered quickly with photosynthesizing plants and filled with with carbon this is why weeds are such a pain they are built to overtake bare soil they're basically just always telling you like hey quit it like I'm trying to help you out when we're sitting there like trying to get rid of them foreign all that to say when we're thinking about what is and is not tillage a lot of it comes down to context and a lot of it comes down to intention so to throw some arbitrary definition on tillage as like I don't know inverting soil layers which is often one or anything that moves the soil around or something like that those are not always going to be helpful to the soil that sort of Dogma will often do more harm than good certainly there's a lot of subjectivity here and so I expect a lively but friendly but friendly debate in the comments section and I think that's it for me I gotta go find some creative b-roll to make this video watchable anyway like this video If you like this video subscribe to the channel if you want to be awesome and learn more no tillage techniques or low tillage techniques or Pro soil techniques whatever you want to call them pick up a copy of the living soil handbook where I discuss a lot more practices they fit into this sort of definition at notogurus.com where the proceeds go to making more of these sorts of videos and the good ones also if you ever come across a video that is how helpful or inspiring to you you can also hit this little button here and give a super thanks otherwise super thanks to you for watching it's about to get windy here we'll see you later hopefully not my tunnels bye [Music] honestly Dennis I think the hardest part about switching over to the dark side is that my tomatoes just do not taste as good [Music]

Channel: No-Till Growers

Views: 136,958

Keywords: no till, tillage, tilling, how to, definition, define, tiller, rotary plow, plowing, compost, farming, agriculture, soil health, healthy soil, regenerative, regenerate, soil practices

Id: RnEWvdxMr7E

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 05 2023