A few weeks ago I listened in on a webinar talking about cover crops and no till farming.
Cover crops are usually planted after crops are harvested at the end of summer. Legume type plants are used most frequently along with things like rye, oats, wheat, turnips, radish, and buckwheat. It is beneficial to plant two or more cover crops at once. What these do is enrich the soil so that it doesn't become depleted of nutrients and so it remains capable of growing crops.
There are still nutrients lost however and a new age form of saving our dirt is called no-till farming. No till means exactly that. There is no plowing. Plowing creates a soil with broken structure that sits on a deeper layer compressed by the farm machinery. In no-till the crop residues can be leached from the surface into the ground allowing anhydrous ammonia, phosphorus, and potassium to be as effective as the tilled fields. In no-till farming, seeds are put in the ground where other plants were pulled from using special equipment.
Tilled soil looks like this
No-till soil looks like this
Nutrient dense soil takes much longer to disintegrate into water.
What is important about this topic is that if farmers could create a way to transition to 100% no till farming we could save our dirt which is vital to our survival.
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Joanna - I just did a research project about sustainable agriculture and no-till practices were definitely part of that. I learned about small-scale sustainable agriculture and implementation for these efforts in sub-Saharan Africa which is a region of high poverty and malnutrition. Reducing the practices of large scale farms such as chemical fertilizer application, large scale irrigation and soil tilling is meant to make the farming in these areas more productive and produce more jobs. One thing that I did remember from my research was that often, farms that also have livestock, would remove the crop cover to feed the livestock instead of allow for the nutrient decomposition of these crops. I did not discover an alternative plan of action for these farms to feed their livestock but I am sure pasture grazing could be an option.
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