Earthquake scientists reveal how overplowing weakens soil at experimental farm
washington.edu
washington.edu
It is also unclear if the paper is removing traffic compaction or it is part of their results. when an MF 8700 with 23,800 pounds rolls around it will compact things. A lot. I have a lunch box to prove it.
Would love to see no-till vs shallow till vs deep plowing. For this paper, they should have introduce and have primary conclusion around the technical data gathering as a novel idea, not draw conclusion from the collected data.
The physics and sensing seems rigorous. Understanding of agricultural taxonomy, farming, is coarse at best. 40 hours of total data during rain is a wee bit short. 2cm depth for the fiber is only going to sense near- or surface. Most crops go deeper than that. Single-site experiment on a single type of soil is very narrow.
To me, plowing (like a chisel plow or moldboard) is to break up soil, and 'folds' old crop like corn stalks back in. It is also the first step for never-used land prep for growing stuff. Usually, beginning of season, compacting, or new site. 8 to 20 inches deep. can flip the soil upside down.
Tilling gets the soil ready for seed, aeration, crumble large lumps and fill larger gaps on the surface, or mix fertilizer/compost into soil. 4 to 12 inches deep.
Discing aka harrowing (disc harrow) usually will cut the remaining roots a few inches deep, often done post plowing. good for putting last years leftovers just a few inches under. 4 to 6 inches.
Note that it seems that as the field size gets smaller, the tilling vs harrowing seems to flip? At least how people consider using them.
(edit: I am all over with this one, but I think the gist comes through.)
> Tillage had been applied at three depths commonly used in farming—no tillage, 10 cm, and 25 cm—while compaction had been imposed using two tire pressure levels—70 kPa for both front and rear tires, and 120 kPa for front and 150 kPa for rear tires.
Plowing vs tilling is also very much about soil erosion and depends very much of the location you are in.
the above is also why tires are better than tracks in many cases. The tire has more compaction, but when you turn it touches less land and so overall is better than a track.
of course every soil is different. For details of you particular land you need an expert who knows your soil.
Overall, the nodig plot harvest 10% more. but here's where it gets interesting. those yields were not uniformly spread across the vegetable types. if you dig into the data, you'll see, some did quite worse with dig and some did quite better. guess which ones did better on dig? Potatoes, Rutabagas, carrots and parsnips and cabbage all did better in Dig! roughly to the tune of about Potatoes 21%, carrots 21%, Rutabaga 14%, Cabbage, 11%, broad beans 10% better. it's all published in his books. Everything else did better with no dig. Shallots especially did 33% better with no-dig, ales 21% better, onions 22% better with no dig.
Digging to turn the soil seems like an old adage that has been passed down through generations, but modern scientific studies are now showing it provides very little to no benefit for yields.
After closing on their new house he asked me for a shovel, for which to install a mailbox. Of course I'd help my friend out. "Sure, buddy!" I said. "Here's a shovel, post-hole digger, pickax and a rock-bar. That should get the job done." After I explained to him that yes, you need a 20 pound pointy chunk of steel to dig any sizable hole around here, he still didn't quite believe me. However, once he got the mailbox planted, he adjusted his beliefs accordingly.
On the rare occasion that I have to dig a hole somewhere with actual dirt, I always find myself amazed at how easy it is. Those times help me understand scenes in TV or movies that include someone digging a hole. Those scenes don't ever depict someone deciding to move whatever it is they're putting in the ground because they hit a massive stone at 8 inches into a 24 inch hole, and there ain't any getting through it. The scenes don't depict the Herculean effort required to just plant a tree. Those shows don't show the absolutely back-breaking labor it takes to be a landscaper around here. And before I had the chance to do the same kind of work in actual soil, those scenes just didn't make sense.
Digging a hole of any depth would probably require explosives!
What is the purpose of planting clover?
(It’s the bacteria in the roots that do the actual nitrogen chemistry.)
"If you mix sand into clay, the clay particles will fill in all the open spaces between the sand particles and often the clay will act as a ‘glue’ sticking all particles together, ultimately resulting in a more dense soil."
For sure. In Dowdings method you put a quite thick layer of compost on top of the existing soil. You then top up the compost every year.
He's a soil vampire, sucking in fertility from somewhere else to feed his own garden.
Compost material can be easily acquired for free. Grass clippings. Wood chips from tree surgeons. They will literally drop it off on your site for free. They have truckloads to get rid of every day. Restaurants. Coffee shops if you are doing it on a smaller scale.
Tree surgeons/arborists are always trying to get rid of chips
An acre? Charles Dowding is a market Gardner, not a farmer, but he has done it on a scale of a few acres.
His compost is a mixture of
1) homemade. When you are trying to expand a plot growing stuff to compost can help. Grass clippings, waste from the garden etc. This is a minor source of very good compost.
2) woodchip, see above
3) green waste. This is other people's garden waste, normally composted poorly by a local authority. You want it some time before you use it so it can compost more fully
4) farmyard/ horse manure
5) spent mushroom compost. Actually I never saw him use this, but it is very common.
One farmer I saw said the secret of no till is 'other peoples carbon', you are correct. But some people have carbon to get rid of.
If you start with Charles Dowdings 6 inches of compost on top, that is not necessarily true. The soil comes to life as worms go mad pulling that compost down into the soil.
It actually works rather well. Year 1 can be very good. Year 2 even better.
The real disappointment in Year 1 is the amount of weeds that find 6 inches of compost no barrier at all! With digging you can get a lot of perennial weed roots out, and hoe off the annuals. With no dig you have to pull them.
I'm not a idealogue, so actually suggest glyphosate before compost...but people don't normally like that suggestion.
On the con side, no-till trades diesel for spray costs.
You won't pay ten quid for a sustainably-farmed chicken, and I bet you're really really not going to pay ten quid for one single hand-grown ecologically-neutral farmed carrot.
And if you are, I've got some carrots for you right here. Discount if you order them in multiples of ten.
Other arguments for tilling exist: aeration, mixing-in of new organic content/fertilizer (not really necessary: green waste can just be dumped at surface level in many cases, and this is already becoming more common in mass-agriculture with 'cover crops'), furrow-creation for seed planting, etc.
Fundamentally, leaving a field uncovered for any length of time is bad and destroys the soil more than if you'd just let it grow weeds or a temporary crop for awhile then culled that as in-place fertilizer for a next crop.
A few months ago some friends of mine visited Australia from overseas and I took them to one of the older wineries in the area. The winery manages something like 10-20 major fields. They brought in a new viticulturalist to manage the fields and the first thing he did was introduce cover crops. In the tasting, they brought out soil cores from before and after the changes, which had only been in place for two years. The difference was tremendous. The old methods, unquestioned for decades, left the soil dry, poor, and largely infertile. The new methods restored organic matter, moisture retention, and a significant sub-surface biome.
You have to do that, so the grasses and clovers can replenish the soil.
We eat because there's six inches of earth, it rains, and cows shit solid gold.
I have around 45 acres of heavy clay, poor agricultural land, which would look very similar to that if we allowed heavy machinery, or even an ATV, on it when it is sodden.
Harry’s Farm on YouTube is much better.
Maybe they knew a thing or two (low earthquake zone, it has to be said)
I mean even Karl Marx talked a ton about soil health and while he mostly talked about "metabolic rift" not tilling (that I know about) specifically it seems like a similar focus on short term output vs long term soil health.
I guess I'm just not clear on if there is actually a new serious problem being "revealed" as the title says or just being substantiated further.
https://www.washington.edu/news/2026/03/19/earthquake-scient...
At the very least it adds a new vector to the position. I was also unaware of how receptive to disruption fiber optic cables were. So, at least I learned that.
Given the economic climate, few non-corporate farmers can afford that investment without the collapse of their farm, and few corporate farmers (none at nationwide scale, afaik) are willing to invest in cost centers that threaten to decrease, rather than increase, their rate of profit growth year-over-year. One could absolutely make a case that regulatory investment in such things be imposed upon megacorp farms first, with their processes and technology made available by subsidy to smaller farms; it would be enough to structure the subsidy as inversely proportional to the acreage reaped for value, with some language ensuring that the cost of investment into land farmed by contract to a megacorp is paid to the land operator. To prevent certain abuses, they’d also have to modify farming contract law to make maintaining long-term use of the land an inalienable right, so that unsustainable output-quota farming contracts are unenforceable.
This is an unlikely outcome in the U.S., but I still appreciate the researches providing more evidence in support of it.
There are a lot of different combinations of variables done for both tilling and not tilling depending on many factors.
Even the old testament talks about letting the land sit fallow for a whole year, so thousands not just hundreds of years.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
It doesn't have to cook the planet to cause massive suffering. Do you think there hasn't been global warming? What amount of global warming would change your mind?
Tilling and using crazy amounts of mineral fertilizer definitely improves yields. But it will, in the long term, also kill agriculture to a large extent if we're not careful. We're not talking about highly speculative outcomes here: The data is pretty clear and everyone with even a large pot and some soil can run the same experiment at home and come to the same conclusions.
Farmers need to survive, they need to earn money, they will obviously optimize for short-term yield. We shouldn't judge them for this, but we _should_ find ways to solve the issue, ideally together with farmers.
The no-till experiments started when the destructive effects of deep deep plowing started to appear (e.g dust bowl). It's a clear sign that society realizes that the local optimum isn't sustainable.
No-till is actually quite technical if done right, often requires some level of herbicides or way to cover the soil.
The argument "why didn't we do it before" is moot, before the 19th century midwives didn't wash hands either, why are they even do it now? Right?
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.
Quick examples:
- Inversion tillage (ploughing) to bury green manure crops or bulky organic manure
- Subsoiling (deep tillage) can help break underground compaction, to allow better root penetration
- Working with soils prone to surface capping
- Full inversion tillage
- Low/min-till
- No-till
EDIT: This is a response to the question "why do it?" rather than anything in the context of the article itself.
And tillage can work well by bringing up nutrients. Some crops will do this themselves to an extent, or you can plant forage crops for a time that will bring up nutrients. But subsoiling to break deep compaction or simply bring up phosphorus or potassium from lower levels can breathe new life into a field.
Source: was full time farmer until Grandpa died.
I'm guessing less developed countries still till the soil? I have no idea.
Go and stick a spade in your garden and then try and drag it sideways. Yeah, not easy, eh? Bit too much to do by hand.
If you want to do "no till", you can get away with a less powerful tractor because you don't need to drag a cultivator through the soil, you just need one that can carry a 400 litre sprayer that blasts glyphosate all over everything every couple of weeks.
Eventually all that's left are the glyphosate-resistant plants that are choking out your crops.
And that's if your soil conditions are actually in any way suitable for no-till, which they often aren't.
> There is also grass cover that is planted after the main crop season, that is later grazed
Grazing compacts the soil, making it impossible to plant in without tilling. So no, this isn't workable.
The USSR and Maoist China did nothing to follow Marxist principles, that was just their leadership's political scape goat to do whatever they wanted because they knew people weren't going to actually read Marx's works. The actual communists that followed Marxist principles are the ones that coined the term "tankies" to call out their leaders and their supporters for abandoning Marxist philosophy. You might as well talk shit about democracy and point at North Korea because they obviously must represent democracy, its in the name of their country and they talk about how awesome their elections are every year.
Also, what someone's overall economic ideals and philosophy amount to has fuck all to do with what are the best farming practices.
Also, just plowing is pointless, the point is to grew plants better, ignoring that and just looking at moisure at some level is pointless