> Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort: you just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil and then dump seed in it. No-till requires things like “tracking the soil’s water retention levels”, “planting cover crops or even giving a field a year off”, and other such steps that in general can be summarized as “cost centers”.

No-Till is one of those ideas like permaculture or Modern Monetary Theory that attracts emphatic advocates while going against conventional practice. It isn’t clear why it would just be being adopted now if it actually worked. Do you have any actual experience farming?

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arthurbrown 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What an odd response. We have centuries of evidence for minimal disturbance agriculture supporting civilizations.

What evidently does NOT work is the quite new practice of industrial tilling and fertilizer, which is causing rapid breakdown of our natural environment and future potential for food production.

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thrownthatway 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What do you mean “does not work”?

The industrial practices that have enable us to feed a population of 8 billion, with surplus - a lot of food is thrown out as waste because we have so much of it we really don’t have to be super strict with it.

The industrial practices that have allowed the majority of the population to do something other than be directly involved in agriculture.

What part of that isn’t working?

The sky is falling, co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks.

We’ve been told these things for, what, at least sixty years now.

Now we can add A.I. will de-employment everyone.

I don’t believe any of it.

	▲	modo_mario 19 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks. The insect population is down a ridiculous amount where I live and also in neighboring germany. I could link the study and such but honestly it's not like these things aren't backed up by my own experiences and those of my parents and grandparents. I do find a lot lot less insects than I did when i was young. We no longer get much (if any) snow let alone the kneedeep stuff. It's harder to catch certain kinds of fish. The fishing boats where I used to visit every year go quite a bit further nowadays because those fish stocks have collapsed.
	▲	Saline9515 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Tilling with large amounts of mined fertilisers and poisons works for now, but is not especially durable. Many of us are going to discover this given that the fertilisers aren't produced anymore since the Hormuz Strait is blocked.
	▲	arthurbrown 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What's the point of this? You are saying that you will not accept any new information that goes against your belief system. The evidence is there. Read something. Watch a video. The resources are readily available and abundant. Make a garden patch and experiment for yourself if you refuse to accept any outside information. This video is 15 years old. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1aR5OLgcc0

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altairprime 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ideally, industrial farming will use this new data to min/max tilling intervals for higher production per acre, which is still wildly suboptimal but at least provably better than arbitrary downtime practices (or even none) that they would otherwise settle on. If nothing else, that’s language their shareholders will listen to: “use fewer resources to produce more goods” is the holy grail of corporations, and fertilizer must be the death of their opex today.

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lurk2 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you have experience as a farmer? If you don’t, why should I believe that farmers who continue to till their fields know less about this issue than you do?

	▲	Saline9515 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		People in a local optimums don't necessarily know about better local optimums.
	▲	arthurbrown 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'm not a farmer, but you are welcome to ask a no-till farmer for their experience, or do some reading. Heck, you could read the article that we're commenting on where scientists have dedicated their career to understanding this stuff.

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ikidd 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We no-till farm thousands of acres in the middle of millions more acres of no-till grain farming. I don't think you have a clue what you're talking about.

	▲	lurk2 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> We no-till farm thousands of acres in the middle of millions more acres of no-till grain farming. 1) Does this practice work in every circumstance? 2) If so, why do farmers continue the practice of tillage? 3) Why did the practice of tillage originate in the first place? It seems extremely unlikely that the practice was adopted and then continued to persist for no reason.

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altairprime 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, I don’t particularly care if the solution is cover crops, no tilling, a mix of both, or some other practice entirely (‘introduce groundhogs’ comes to mind as a particularly inflammatory option for mycelial networking). Advocacy for any single solution is not particularly interesting to me, so long as any practice is followed besides “dump imported nitrogen into the hopper each year until your waterways are toast”. (I am not your farmer, this is not farming advice.)