No-till Vs. Conventional tillage agriculture
To till or not to till that is the question? This may seem like a silly pun on one of Shakespeare's famous lines, but this is a very valid question with many farmers across the land today. No-till, or conservation tillage is a increasingly popular means of working the land by preparing a micro seed bed 2-3” wide. When compared to conventional tillage where soil is inverted and mixed, conservation tillage seems very low impact. And this low impact way of preparing and for crops helps the soil to develop better structure and reduce erosion among a host of other benefits. No-till is defined by Hall as, “(that) which refers broadly to different approaches for reducing the amount of soil tillage before planting and after harvest.” While this is a very generalized definition this is the basic idea behind no-till agriculture. Conservation tillage research started in the 1940’s, following World War II. Just as plant growth regulators (herbicides) were being developed, (Gorman, 117). Herbicides are essential to no-till agriculture because without them conventional plow tillage is the only way to kill weeds that compete with crop plants. But at first no-till didn’t really catch on. By the early 1970s only eight percent of al
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Approximate Word count = 918
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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