silvio berlusconi
Member
Out of curiosity does anyone run a zero-till organic farm in the UK?
Organic Zero-Till - Anyone in the UK
- Thread starter silvio berlusconi
- Start date
- Location
- Essex Coast
Well, that is what I would like to end up doing, but no one has fathomed how to do it yet. To get a clean start you either have to use glyphosate or cultivate!
Dan Powell
Member
- Location
- Shropshire
I think you would need to plough/cultivate rotationally. Eg three year ley then plough for spring beans then no till wheat undersown with white clover for a few years until you broke down to grass weed hell then back to a grass ley.
SilliamWhale
Member
I suppose Charles Dowding does it with all his veg.
- Location
- Wexcombe, Wiltshire
I have been asked to drill Spring barley for an organic farmer next spring into white clover. Will keep you all updated as and when things happen!
the holy grail !
SilliamWhale
Member
Is it really though? We'd probably miss artificial N quite significantly at the moment.
im trying to set up a (small !) field to try Dr Ingham's organic zero-till. if I can get the right compost to make it happen plan is to balance biology to her instruction and then grow continuous zero-till wheat, ideally with no chemicals but might have to concede glyphosate (balanced with humic acid when applied)
at ORFC she said 10t/ha was possible..............................
Louis Mc
Member
- Location
- Meath, Ireland
Had she any farm scale examples of this working? I think if I had mastered it on our farm I'd be smugly telling the world about it. Does she advise against rotation?
Feldspar
Member
- Location
- Essex, Cambs and Suffolk
I've got a friend nearby who farms 3000ac of organic combinables with some 3yr grazed herbal leys. They were thinking about going down the no-till route. I think they're just about to buy some Swedish drill which IIRC can direct drill and then inter-row hoe as well. He recently went to Sweden to look at the system and I think he saw a Swedish organic no-tiller there.
silvio berlusconi
Member
Interesting, thanks.
Tom Sewell
Member
- Location
- Maidstone Kent
Gabe Brown is almost there in NDakota! Only uses one herb every three years and no N!
glasshouse
Member
- Location
- lothians
yes some VERY large scale examples but not in the UK unfortunaelty
yes she does advice against rotation
maybe...........but only one way to find out ! I don't like to dismiss anything as impossible without even trying
I have examples of what I would have thought of as impossible 10 years ago on my farm today
Take all will decline after a few years and allegedly no till helps as no soil movement helps the natural soil component (cant remember what it is ) that suppresses the take all
Why does she advise against rotation ? surely that goes against most thinking, although I guess PP does ok
it is against most thinking (including my own !) which state greater diversity is the route to soil health
her view is you balance fungi/bacteria ratio and then lift this levels as high as you can via compost and compost teas, you create a soil where the crop (wheat for example) has abundant fungi and bacteria species that it needs for that crop and by mono culture you increase them year on year creating a soil where the conditions are most favourable for that crop and not weeds etc that would in a more conventional unbalanced and diversely cropped soil compete with the cash crop
Will be Interesting to see how it works out, would guess you would have to be pretty careful in the first few years not to apply any chems that would disrupt the good guys
I would love to be able to prove her right ! trouble is its not an easy thing to even try, getting or making proper compost and teas is almost impossible it seems, simple things like finding muck without wormer or antibiotics is not straight forward !