If you’ve spent a few minutes on our website, you may have seen the phrase “no-till” sprinkled throughout our sales pitch. We genuinely believe that being no-till gives our farm a distinct advantage, but we also know that the phrase is probably unfamiliar to most. And it’s certainly not the norm for agriculture in general. So, let’s discuss what we mean by no till, why we believe it’s important, and what it does to a small vegetable farm like ours!
What Is Tilling?
It’s a mental image as old as agriculture itself: step 1 to growing any kind of food is taking the ground and churning it up or moving it around in some way. This is what we broadly call “tilling” today. It’s probably the main contributor to the idea that farming is endless toiling and work, which, if you’re tilling, can be quite true!
Anyone who has ever tried to prepare an old piece of soil by hand knows that it’s a TON of backbreaking work. That said, tilling in some form has been a mainstay of agriculture for most of its history. From simple hand tools to the moldboard plow carried by livestock to the tractor, humans have been churning up the top several inches of soil for thousands of years to grow food.
Why have humans done this initial step for so long? Well, because it works! Tilling can have many benefits for the health of the crop that grows afterward. First and foremost, tilling creates a soil structure and nutrient availability that is ideal for most annual crops that humans like to eat. These crops love a loose, aerated soil and nutrients that are easy to get to. If you’ve done a good job tilling a piece of land, you end up with a fluffy soil that has all of the nutrients within the layer that has been tilled evenly distributed and incorporated.
Tilling also disrupts any weeds that were growing, giving your crop less competition to grow. Finally, tilling can produce a fine, smooth surface that gives small seeds a better chance to germinate properly.
Why We Don’t Till
If there are such great benefits to tilling, why don’t we do it? Well, like most things, there are several drawbacks to tilling.
The main drawback to tilling is that it destroys much of the soil-borne life that drives the engine of root growth. Tilling often adds so much air to the soil that bacterial growth explodes to the detriment of fungi, nematodes, and all of the worms and bugs that intertwine to hold the soil together.
This lack of biodiversity makes it easier for pathogens to dominate the soil and infect crops. It also disrupts the nutrient cycle, giving the soil a nutrient boost initially, but quickly depleting those soil nutrients through erosion or volatilization.
Thus, a farmer can be forced to take measures to remedy the disease and nutrient issues with pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers. These substances further destroy the soil food web, lower diversity, and create a vicious cycle where more and more synthetic chemicals must be used to ensure plant health and growth.
Tilling also greatly increases soil erosion because the soil is less able to hold together through wind and rain, also creating a vicious cycle of nutrient loss.
When we thought about how we wanted to farm, it seemed clear to us that a highly diverse environment was the best way to proactively manage pests and diseases. High biodiversity, especially in the soil, results in such high levels of competition that no one pathogen, disease, or pest can take over and destroy crops. This idea makes the drawbacks of tilling untenable, so we had to farm in a different way. That’s where the no-till techniques that we practice come into play.
What No-Till Looks Like On Our Farm
Replacing tillage is not a one-to-one switch, but rather a collection of farming practices that, when combined, produce the beautiful, healthy, and productive soils our crops need, while also minimizing or eliminating the negative aspects of tilling.
The main challenge for no-till farms is how to create a soil structure where there is enough air and reduced compaction for healthy crops. We have several systems for managing this, but the main two are cover crops and broadforking.
Cover crops are crops that aren’t harvested but instead planted in between cash crops to achieve some benefit. One of the main no-till benefits of cover crops is that their roots push and fill the soil, breaking it apart as they grow. Then, when the cover crop is terminated, those roots are broken down, leaving pockets of air and organic matter in their place.
The broadfork is a more human-centric system, but it invokes the same principles. Basically, a broadfork is a specially designed fork that allows the user to put the fork into the ground, gently lean back the fork, and break the top several inches of soil loose from below. The soil isn’t turned or inverted, but the holes made by the fork tines and popping the soil from below introduce just enough air to improve the soil. Also, because the disturbance to the soil is minimized, the fungi, microbes, and bugs aren’t disrupted or destroyed, maintaining that biodiversity.
Avoiding tilling also means that weeds can’t simply be pulverized by a tiller. To manage weeds, we also have a couple of systems, namely mulch and cultivation.
Mulch is fairly simple. It’s anything that you put on top of the soil to protect it. We use mulch not only for protection, but to suppress weeds. For us, natural mulches like straw, hay, and wood chips are used, but there are many, many different materials that can be used as mulch.
Cultivation is simply eliminating weeds by hand. We’ve discussed some of our tools for that job, but the key for us is getting rid of weeds frequently and when they are very small. Having that mindset quickly results in a farm that is virtually weed-free.
Most no-till farms will tell you that while it can take a few years for no-till systems to establish themselves, once they do they can be as or more productive than a tillage system and require less labor to manage. So far, we’re seeing just that at our farm!
The parts of the farm that were set up first are starting to show signs of better crop growth, less disease presence, and less nutrient inputs, all while being more weed-free.
“No-Till”, Not “Never Till”
Want to know the best way to start off a no-till garden? Tilling, of course!
Our farm was basically a large grass lawn when we started. While there are ways to turn sod into a functional garden without ever tilling, they are quite a bit more expensive and VERY slow. We did not have the luxury of cash or time to start our garden this way, so instead, we did a very intentional single tillage to kick things off.
We used a rotary plow attached to our BCS walking tractor to till the top 8-12 inches of soil, and then we covered that soil with a tarp for several months to kill off the sod and any weed seeds we brought up. After that, we added some rock amendments and a couple inches of compost, followed by a cover crop. After that, we had ready-to-go no-till beds that hopefully will never encounter the tiller again!
It’s important to understand that when farmers like me say “no-till” what we really mean is that we farm with an aversion to the negative effects of tillage, not that we have a dogmatic approach to never turning the soil over. If done properly, tillage can set up your farm to be more ecologically healthy and productive than it was before. What’s important is always thinking about what is best for the biological health of the soil. A living soil is a healthy soil!
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