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Comment by monkaiju | Hacker News Reader

I realize this exact data might be novel, but haven't we know that till-reliant farming was detrimental to soil for a long time? The no-till people are a huge part of the permaculture movement, also theres always folks talking about how important fungal networks are and how they're largely destroyed by tilling.

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.

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The original article is markedly better at explaining that this is substantiation through direct evidence of soil structure in live fields, as opposed to e.g. core samples or whatever.

https://www.washington.edu/news/2026/03/19/earthquake-scient...

Agreed. This hardly seems like novel information. The method at which he arrived at it is neat though, fwiw.

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.

If no till is better and tilling is work, why do farmers till? Why not do less work and have a better result?

In short term profits vs long term benefits, we all know who wins.

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”.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

>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.

> co2 will cook the planet

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?

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?

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.

Can you explain to me why a farmer with a financial stake in this argument continues to till his soil? Can you explain the benefits of tillage, or are you arguing that it has no benefits?

The modern industrial farming complex is designed to treat every field as identical, and to allow as few people as possible to work as big an area as possible. That allows for standardizing methods and optimizing the output per acre. Tilling the soil is mainly for aeration: the farm equipment rolling over the fields (which is needed to massively reduce labor costs) compact them, so you need to loosen the soil again. It's also for weeding; if you till before you plant you uproot any plants already growing there (weeding by hand is extremely labor intensive). It also allows you to mix compost and other beneficial components into your soil to further aerate it and give space for roots to grow. It's all to give your field a "blank canvas" that you apply your crops to, where you can just dump about 2-3x the recommended amount of fertilizer into it and not worry about the particular conditions of the soil itself beforehand.

People in a local optimums don't necessarily know about better local optimums.

Tillage as a practice has existed for around 10,000 years. I’m supposed to believe that 10,000 years worth of people never figured out that the enormous amounts of energy they were investing into tillage was worse than just doing nothing?

Tillage before motorized agriculture was much more superficial. Besides, there are many examples of no-till traditional agriculture, or adjacent versions such as agroforestry.

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?

10,000 years of feast and famine. Until the enlightenment, people were basically just guessing and sharing anecdotes.

Because there are other factors at play. No-till is mostly about sustainability of farming. Humans often don't optimize for the most sustainable option but for the option that's most profitable (or perceived to be most profitable) _right now_.

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.

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.)

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.

> 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.

Tilling comes in many different forms. The old plow is out nearly everywhere because it is so bad. Debending on local climate and soil some places farmers do some tilling others do none. There are lots of little companies scattered around the world that make a tillage tool for that local area that wouldn't be useful elsewhere if they tried to sell it.

There are circumstances and soil types that encourage tillage, usually dealing with water. Organic farming trades spray for diesel fuel. And farmers don't like change, but no-till is so ubiquitous that it's hard to find farms that till unless it's unavoidable, such as fixing problems from harvest time.

Giving a field a year off and cover crops have been done for hundreds of years by farmers who also till.

There are a lot of different combinations of variables done for both tilling and not tilling depending on many factors.

Years off don't work great when coupled with high land prices and taxes.

Lots of places give property tax breaks for agricultural land, which includes fallow fields.

Correct, the point is getting a $50,000 break doesn't make up that you didn't make $100,000 putting corn on it.

> Giving a field a year off and cover crops have been done for hundreds of years

Even the old testament talks about letting the land sit fallow for a whole year, so thousands not just hundreds of years.

No till requires access to first world country technology to make work. No till in the United States and similar countries is very very very established practice. It's not less work by any means, it's just a different kind of work with different machinery.

Source: was full time farmer until Grandpa died.

I'm guessing less developed countries still till the soil? I have no idea.

The other replies make fair points, but tillage does still have it's uses.

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

There's also a spectrum:

  - Full inversion tillage
  - Low/min-till
  - No-till

With a wide range of operations you can perform from one end to the other. You might end up taking a mix-and-match approach as years/fields demand it.

EDIT: This is a response to the question "why do it?" rather than anything in the context of the article itself.

This is actual reality. No-till is great until you have to till because of circumstances. Sometimes what happens needs to be dealt with; we've had years of heavy, heavy rain, and despite decades of no-till farming, it still can't absorb limitless water. That's when compaction happens, especially if you need to get crops off wet ground. So you deal with it, and start again building the soil back from tillage. You don't have to always haul out the 3-bottom plow, but even discing has a recovery period. But it's better than trying to seed into concrete.

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.

Because no-till doesn't scale. It's incredible for market gardening to feed the rich who can pay a premium at a farmers market, but it's not going to feed the world.

Modern farming already uses low or no till.

The estimated area of no-till in Brazil is between 33 to 50 million hectares. It won't be hard for you to find videos of no-till corn being planted following soybean. There is also grass cover that is planted after the main crop season, that is later grazed. This cover stays till the next year and the new crop is planted without tilling. You may need to use "plantio direto" "milho safrinha" and "braquiária de cobertura" plus some translation.

I've seen those videos, and they all look terrible.

> 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.

No-till feeds the world. The amount of no-till in current full-scale agriculture is by far the biggest proportion in North America and Europe.

If you want to till, you need quite a big tractor that burns quite a lot of diesel to drag a cultivator through the soil. This is not the same as a plough, but at some point you'll end up ploughing.

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.

After Marx’s philosophy caused a famine that led millions to die, you think he has useful agriculture knowledge to teach us?

You should maybe do a bit more reading on what Marx actually said and promoted versus what the USSR actually did in practice. Farming co-ops have been growing consistently since from before you were born, and is the most direct example of Marx's economic ideals in practice.

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.

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