Have any of the religious direct drillers been ploughing or tilling this time?
- Thread starter JCfarmer
- Start date
Although it costs me 5l/ha of fuel to establish a crop so that is related to carbon.
SilliamWhale
Member
More than just the fuel its the tractor manufacture, hours etc.
Feldspar
Member
- Location
- Essex, Cambs and Suffolk
Yes, obviously establishment per hectare in energy costs are lower, but that wasn't the point of contention. That said, if yield does not hold up under no-till then energy costs per tonne could be different.
Feldspar
Member
- Location
- Essex, Cambs and Suffolk
A few things to say about this.
I can find probably 5 more studies like this, especially on CO2 fluxes, which would show the same. The problem is what do you do with the 5+ studies saying the opposite. One thing I have done a bit of reading on this morning is which method is better to measure carbon loss / gains from soils; is it flux measurements or taking soil samples and doing something like LOI tests. I couldn't find anything that was really useful on this point. Best was this:
Source:
Assessment Methods for Soil Carbon
edited by John M. Kimble, Ronald F. Follett, B.A.
I think you know me well enough to know that I am naturally supportive of no-till systems and want them to work. I spent a lot of time and money trying them on our farm. That said, I want to report the evidence as I see it. Your study is not a long-term study and it's not a highly cited paper (15 citations means it's exactly a seminal paper in the field). You would need to persuade me that their methodology is far superior to the much longer term soil sampling studies that are highly equivocal on this issue. Remember, I am saying there is no clear evidence that no-till by itself sequesters more carbon than ploughing, whereas you are saying there is. Yours is a much stronger claim, which has a greater burden of proof on it.
SilliamWhale
Member
If you get soil erosion from intensive tillage which ends up in water courses etc are we to pretend that is not Carbon leaving the field?
Feldspar
Member
- Location
- Essex, Cambs and Suffolk
I think there is much clearer evidence on the benefits of no-till from aggregate stability and soil loss due to run-off (although there are some issues with higher no-till P losses due to much higher P concentrations near the surface in no-till systems). You would need to show that that soil loss means greater atmospheric carbon which is what we're discussing. I did actually come across a paper by Lal on this earlier. Will try and find it again.
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Because of the monoculture element.
Yes, residues count a little, but the real driver of deep soil Carbon is to have deep roots in the soil - which few combineable crops have.
So, if there is only a limited liquid Carbon pathway (shallow), then there will be only minor differences to stocks at the end of ten minutes or 100 years, because of the continuous outward flow of CO2; I really hope they didn't incur much expense testing the hypothesis.
SilliamWhale
Member
I wasnt discussing just atmospheric carbon though. I was discussing both carbon in its solid state as it were (soil) and its gas state (co2) although im not sure thats the right phrase to use.
Tillage still loses carbon through erosion in its solid state and co2 emissons from tillage are measureable. I do think however you will lose less stable carbon in the tillage system when OM gets to a certain point. I also would concede that co2 is not necessarily " bad" per se, it is after all a by product of respiration.
I definitely wouldnt try to claim any type of modern crop production is particularly ghg friendly. No till definitely has its limitations from an ecosystem perspective
- Location
- Moreton-in-Marsh, Glos
How VERY dare you!!!!! (What tv program was that from?)
What is the carbon footprint of the Glyphosate you use? (Don’t forget it is nearly all made in China!)
And what are you going to do when it is made illegal to use?
My reason for having returned to ploughing is totally down to far more efficient Blackgrass control.
The fact that it still allows me to drill early and I did get it all drilled here by early October is a huge bonus this year.
But it might just turn out that by continuing to plough here, I am future-proofing this farm, insofar as I have proved that we can farm without Glyphosate.
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You’re future proofing relies on everything the future legislation is going against!
- Location
- Moreton-in-Marsh, Glos
Well, we don’t know.
You maybe have got one angle of it covered and maybe I have the other angle.
However, wouldn’t it be a bugger if having made ploughing illegal (which I doubt that they could or would do), they then banned glyphosate?
That is why I warn of certain farmers shouting too load about their system, with no regard whatsoever that it won’t work everywhere.
Where a-bouts in Suffolk are you? I used to farm there myself.
South bury on the hanslope. I agree with you, I don’t really care what others do, it’s fun to stir though!
Shughie McFee
Member
why ? ruins the forum.
Stupid boy
Averaging 17acres an hour for 4 days and nights is impressive. How many drills?
Someone bit
- Location
- Hammerwich
One 12m could just do that running 14/15 hours a day in 4 days. Would need to be running 10-12kph in big fields though.
' Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler?'
If I had bit then 'stupid boy' would not have been my response.
Stupid boy