SilliamWhale
Member
Tradition is ok. Tradition can blinker though
The future of arable cropping
- Thread starter Ninjago
- Start date
Tradition is ok. Tradition can blinker though
But ploughing was very shallow in those days .
A local lad used to come and warm his competition plough on our stubbles , they were green over in a month .
You can't beat proper rigorous science.
Aslong as you are doing the tests on land that has been in each system for long enough. Direct drilling into land that has been ploughed for the last 40 years will not give a true comparison. This is problem with many of these trials comparing systems.
They also tend to want to use the same equipment on the same day for each operation if they can to reduce the amount of variables, which means timings on one cropping technique is always compromised. I can see why they want to do it but it is far from ideal.
Some deep ploughed land to the west of here that hasn’t been able to be got back onto with the wet is also rank with BG now.
I agree I’ve yet to see a trial that is actually any good on this kind of thing, not convinced the niab ones are that great despite being a great fan of them. It’s still viewing the whole thing as just a different way to establish the crop and not a whole different agronomic system.
Suffolk Serf
Member
- Location
- Bury/Thetford
I'm not long back from a trip to Argentina. There are no subsidies and prices are held down by export tarrifs. There is a strong focus on cost control and the standard of management is very high across the board.
About 90% of combinable and forage crops are established by no-till, this has built up over the last 20 years. A typical rotation would be Corn (maize), soybeans, winter wheat followed by double crop soybeans.
About 90% of combinable and forage crops are established by no-till, this has built up over the last 20 years. A typical rotation would be Corn (maize), soybeans, winter wheat followed by double crop soybeans.
- Location
- East meath/dublin
Anything can blinker if you dont keep an open mind, im open minded about no till but unless i can see real benefits and more importantly that these savings can pay for the very expensive kit then i will be sticking with a plough based system .
My stuff is long paid for and while ploughing is slower than no till it is really not that expensive. Also my ground is in good heart with high organic matter thanks to regular dressing of slurry and dung . Whatever wortks for you or any farmer for that matter no need to slag of someone elses way of working .
- Location
- East meath/dublin
Anything can blinker if you dont keep an open mind, im open minded about no till but unless i can see real benefits and more importantly that these savings can pay for the very expensive kit then i will be sticking with a plough based system .
My stuff is long paid for and while ploughing is slower than no till it is really not that expensive. Also my ground is in good heart with high organic matter thanks to regular dressing of slurry and dung . Whatever wortks for you or any farmer for that matter no need to slag of someone elses way of working .
- Location
- Northumberlandia
ive 135ac lying ploughed here & most of that was finished by 2nd week of Oct & there is nowt & i mean nowt growing thru any of it.
9" deep no faffing about playing at 5-6" deep here.
Its well wintered now with all that rain
Be easy to work in the spring, if we get one
Just goes to show that there is such a massive variation between the same system, never mind different systems, that you can pick and choose the results that back up your personal preference.ive 135ac lying ploughed here & most of that was finished by 2nd week of Oct & there is nowt & i mean nowt growing thru any of it.
9" deep no faffing about playing at 5-6" deep here.
Its well wintered now with all that rain
Be easy to work in the spring, if we get one
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Wait til you see no-chem no-till at work, unfortunately many on this thread have spent their whole careers chasing unsustainable solutions.
If neither chemistry nor physical disturbance hold the keys, can anyone think of another science to try?
The simple answer is that soils are degraded from either form of stressor, hence my use of the word "unsustainable".
Most cropping methods are unsustainable so please, don't feel as this is an attack
So .... the future obviously lies in not continuing doing things to your soils that compact, disturb, or extract from them, because your soil biology has been hammered for hundreds to thousands of years with mouldboards, and now Batemans.
Residues robbed, maybe swapped for some cowshit, but that's by the by.
I personally believe that you don't have a future if you do not change the way you think about "being a cropping farmer" and all that entails, because:
Your yields are far too high
Your rotations lack any semblance of diversity, and your cash crops roll around too fast
Annual crops are just too energy hungry/inefficient, thus you need to plant too much area into them
You're limited by your paradigms that the only thing to take this "food" away is a combine harvester
Many of your soil biomes are more suited to woodland, but you don't embrace those possibilities
Lack of livestock-ability in some cases, why worry about crimping rollers when people can't feed the stock they've got?
You most all are blinkered by ag-chem spin, and popular science makes you dismissive of what's right in front of you, this isn't your faults but represents a great opportunity to learn new things, that are old things elsewhere in the world
You really need to forget about "feeding the country/world" and stop sending your margin to town; they aren't grateful enough to send you back their sh!t so forget the "production at all costs" from 70 years ago, yes The War ended
You also need to realise that this pesticide-based no-till system is just as much of a fungi-killer as full tillage, we all evolved from fungi and so to declare war on fungi (even unwittingly, because the chemists weren't allowed to say) is at a stroke, declaring war on your humus production, and also on humans (humans, humus, get it yet)
Most ALL civilisations owe their extinction to soil depletion, this time due to our other failings (nitrogen salts, plastic pollution, waste, and sheer energy consumption) we won't have another go
Homo sapiens survived homo neanderthalensis because sapiens could survive on 3000kj and neanderthalensis needed 5000kj
Modern sapiens RDI 8700kj
Modern industrial ag requires 10j of fossil energy per j of food output, so if we keep this up we are approximately 33 times as FÙCKED as the Neanderthals were, remember nearly all of our food supply was foraged for for 200,000 years, agricultural techniques began 10-15,000 years ago but it's only been in the past 80 years that this great dependency on "inputs" began at all.
It's only been in the past 50 years that many current ailments have been discovered, again due mainly to diet, and the toxins entering our cells from this diet
What we have entered is the new age, that where agriculture and general society look back to where we went wrong (increase food supply instead of control the population) and ask some tough questions
If you think the end of glyphosate is the end of the world, then get out while you can is my best advice, because you're probably not going to be able to make the necessary change to your paradigm in time to save your businesses.
Sorry folks, as you were, keen to see who wins the latest p!ssing contest about plough vs pesticide
(You're tied, BTW)
If neither chemistry nor physical disturbance hold the keys, can anyone think of another science to try?
The simple answer is that soils are degraded from either form of stressor, hence my use of the word "unsustainable".
Most cropping methods are unsustainable so please, don't feel as this is an attack
So .... the future obviously lies in not continuing doing things to your soils that compact, disturb, or extract from them, because your soil biology has been hammered for hundreds to thousands of years with mouldboards, and now Batemans.
Residues robbed, maybe swapped for some cowshit, but that's by the by.
I personally believe that you don't have a future if you do not change the way you think about "being a cropping farmer" and all that entails, because:
Your yields are far too high
Your rotations lack any semblance of diversity, and your cash crops roll around too fast
Annual crops are just too energy hungry/inefficient, thus you need to plant too much area into them
You're limited by your paradigms that the only thing to take this "food" away is a combine harvester
Many of your soil biomes are more suited to woodland, but you don't embrace those possibilities
Lack of livestock-ability in some cases, why worry about crimping rollers when people can't feed the stock they've got?
You most all are blinkered by ag-chem spin, and popular science makes you dismissive of what's right in front of you, this isn't your faults but represents a great opportunity to learn new things, that are old things elsewhere in the world
You really need to forget about "feeding the country/world" and stop sending your margin to town; they aren't grateful enough to send you back their sh!t so forget the "production at all costs" from 70 years ago, yes The War ended
You also need to realise that this pesticide-based no-till system is just as much of a fungi-killer as full tillage, we all evolved from fungi and so to declare war on fungi (even unwittingly, because the chemists weren't allowed to say) is at a stroke, declaring war on your humus production, and also on humans (humans, humus, get it yet)
Most ALL civilisations owe their extinction to soil depletion, this time due to our other failings (nitrogen salts, plastic pollution, waste, and sheer energy consumption) we won't have another go
Homo sapiens survived homo neanderthalensis because sapiens could survive on 3000kj and neanderthalensis needed 5000kj
Modern sapiens RDI 8700kj
Modern industrial ag requires 10j of fossil energy per j of food output, so if we keep this up we are approximately 33 times as FÙCKED as the Neanderthals were, remember nearly all of our food supply was foraged for for 200,000 years, agricultural techniques began 10-15,000 years ago but it's only been in the past 80 years that this great dependency on "inputs" began at all.
It's only been in the past 50 years that many current ailments have been discovered, again due mainly to diet, and the toxins entering our cells from this diet
What we have entered is the new age, that where agriculture and general society look back to where we went wrong (increase food supply instead of control the population) and ask some tough questions
If you think the end of glyphosate is the end of the world, then get out while you can is my best advice, because you're probably not going to be able to make the necessary change to your paradigm in time to save your businesses.
Sorry folks, as you were, keen to see who wins the latest p!ssing contest about plough vs pesticide
(You're tied, BTW)
As ever interesting. Do you genuinely believe that 7 billion people can be fed (ie can we produce enough calories, disregarding the fact that some people won't be able to pay) with your vision of the future?Wait til you see no-chem no-till at work, unfortunately many on this thread have spent their whole careers chasing unsustainable solutions.
If neither chemistry nor physical disturbance hold the keys, can anyone think of another science to try?
The simple answer is that soils are degraded from either form of stressor, hence my use of the word "unsustainable".
Most cropping methods are unsustainable so please, don't feel as this is an attack
So .... the future obviously lies in not continuing doing things to your soils that compact, disturb, or extract from them, because your soil biology has been hammered for hundreds to thousands of years with mouldboards, and now Batemans.
Residues robbed, maybe swapped for some cowshit, but that's by the by.
I personally believe that you don't have a future if you do not change the way you think about "being a cropping farmer" and all that entails, because:
Your yields are far too high
Your rotations lack any semblance of diversity, and your cash crops roll around too fast
Annual crops are just too energy hungry/inefficient, thus you need to plant too much area into them
You're limited by your paradigms that the only thing to take this "food" away is a combine harvester
Many of your soil biomes are more suited to woodland, but you don't embrace those possibilities
Lack of livestock-ability in some cases, why worry about crimping rollers when people can't feed the stock they've got?
You most all are blinkered by ag-chem spin, and popular science makes you dismissive of what's right in front of you, this isn't your faults but represents a great opportunity to learn new things, that are old things elsewhere in the world
You really need to forget about "feeding the country/world" and stop sending your margin to town; they aren't grateful enough to send you back their sh!t so forget the "production at all costs" from 70 years ago, yes The War ended
You also need to realise that this pesticide-based no-till system is just as much of a fungi-killer as full tillage, we all evolved from fungi and so to declare war on fungi (even unwittingly, because the chemists weren't allowed to say) is at a stroke, declaring war on your humus production, and also on humans (humans, humus, get it yet)
Most ALL civilisations owe their extinction to soil depletion, this time due to our other failings (nitrogen salts, plastic pollution, waste, and sheer energy consumption) we won't have another go
Homo sapiens survived homo neanderthalensis because sapiens could survive on 3000kj and neanderthalensis needed 5000kj
Modern sapiens RDI 8700kj
Modern industrial ag requires 10j of fossil energy per j of food output, so if we keep this up we are approximately 33 times as FÙCKED as the Neanderthals were, remember nearly all of our food supply was foraged for for 200,000 years, agricultural techniques began 10-15,000 years ago but it's only been in the past 80 years that this great dependency on "inputs" began at all.
It's only been in the past 50 years that many current ailments have been discovered, again due mainly to diet, and the toxins entering our cells from this diet
What we have entered is the new age, that where agriculture and general society look back to where we went wrong (increase food supply instead of control the population) and ask some tough questions
If you think the end of glyphosate is the end of the world, then get out while you can is my best advice, because you're probably not going to be able to make the necessary change to your paradigm in time to save your businesses.
Sorry folks, as you were, keen to see who wins the latest p!ssing contest about plough vs pesticide
(You're tied, BTW)
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Easily, but tweaks to agriculture alone won't ever get us there.
This "food" and land use dilemma, it's a two-way thing, and at the moment our excrement is too laden with toxins to be of any use to our soil biome, we may as well use salts in the meantime.
But our great success was the ability to learn, to adapt, and to forage - as unpleasant as this will sound to the professional 25 stone pizza pilots, the future of food (and the growing of it) probably bears little resemblance to the current decadent, wasteful, convenient one.
Hopefully the strain will be too much for many, because in any herd you want to keep the efficient and effective ones alive!
Sorry if you need a C-section or healthcare, because the doctors and nurses will be needing to gather their own food, I expect there will be huge loss of life to come.
They chem boys love the sb about "nitrogen fertiliser stopped a billion people from starving", shame about that because it facilitated a food model that could starve all of us, in time
Basically everything about "civilisation" is built around arrogance, convenience, and bloody motor-cars, so there is a lot to be done.
Whether people see the need to change, or whether they just deny it, I cannot predict at all.
Looking over this thread, I think denial will win, it's the new human nature to ignore our own basic flaws, to justify what we do instead of being considerate of soil - we are made of the soil, and she will swallow us soon enough.
Suffolk Serf
Member
- Location
- Bury/Thetford
Two of the best rants that I’ve read in a long time from the Kiwi.
SilliamWhale
Member
There are methane emissions from rotting crops but that's natural. Methane isn't bad. It needs to be put in its context.
I would agree that adding N builds more C. The tricky one for all us farmers is our nitrogen use efficiency is about 50%.
SilliamWhale
Member
Who's slagging who off? We're having a discussion.
SilliamWhale
Member
The lack of Nitrogen was a very real thing. Read The Alchemy of Air - the story predated any big corporation.
There is a phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants", you are able to criticise the motorcar, fat people, bad quality food etc over the net because you like all of us are standing on the shoulders of giants. Not every step humankind makes is a progressive or better one, but not every step is a worse one either. There are less people starving than their ever were (proportionally), we have less wars, we are richer etc. I'm not a doomsday man myself.
Wait til you see no-chem no-till at work, unfortunately many on this thread have spent their whole careers chasing unsustainable solutions.
If neither chemistry nor physical disturbance hold the keys, can anyone think of another science to try?
The simple answer is that soils are degraded from either form of stressor, hence my use of the word "unsustainable".
Most cropping methods are unsustainable so please, don't feel as this is an attack
So .... the future obviously lies in not continuing doing things to your soils that compact, disturb, or extract from them, because your soil biology has been hammered for hundreds to thousands of years with mouldboards, and now Batemans.
Residues robbed, maybe swapped for some cowshit, but that's by the by.
I personally believe that you don't have a future if you do not change the way you think about "being a cropping farmer" and all that entails, because:
Your yields are far too high
Your rotations lack any semblance of diversity, and your cash crops roll around too fast
Annual crops are just too energy hungry/inefficient, thus you need to plant too much area into them
You're limited by your paradigms that the only thing to take this "food" away is a combine harvester
Many of your soil biomes are more suited to woodland, but you don't embrace those possibilities
Lack of livestock-ability in some cases, why worry about crimping rollers when people can't feed the stock they've got?
You most all are blinkered by ag-chem spin, and popular science makes you dismissive of what's right in front of you, this isn't your faults but represents a great opportunity to learn new things, that are old things elsewhere in the world
You really need to forget about "feeding the country/world" and stop sending your margin to town; they aren't grateful enough to send you back their sh!t so forget the "production at all costs" from 70 years ago, yes The War ended
You also need to realise that this pesticide-based no-till system is just as much of a fungi-killer as full tillage, we all evolved from fungi and so to declare war on fungi (even unwittingly, because the chemists weren't allowed to say) is at a stroke, declaring war on your humus production, and also on humans (humans, humus, get it yet)
Most ALL civilisations owe their extinction to soil depletion, this time due to our other failings (nitrogen salts, plastic pollution, waste, and sheer energy consumption) we won't have another go
Homo sapiens survived homo neanderthalensis because sapiens could survive on 3000kj and neanderthalensis needed 5000kj
Modern sapiens RDI 8700kj
Modern industrial ag requires 10j of fossil energy per j of food output, so if we keep this up we are approximately 33 times as FÙCKED as the Neanderthals were, remember nearly all of our food supply was foraged for for 200,000 years, agricultural techniques began 10-15,000 years ago but it's only been in the past 80 years that this great dependency on "inputs" began at all.
It's only been in the past 50 years that many current ailments have been discovered, again due mainly to diet, and the toxins entering our cells from this diet
What we have entered is the new age, that where agriculture and general society look back to where we went wrong (increase food supply instead of control the population) and ask some tough questions
If you think the end of glyphosate is the end of the world, then get out while you can is my best advice, because you're probably not going to be able to make the necessary change to your paradigm in time to save your businesses.
Sorry folks, as you were, keen to see who wins the latest p!ssing contest about plough vs pesticide
(You're tied, BTW)
Very noble, and there's much I agree with in there. The dilemma for most of us is to work out how we're going to pay the rent. There will be less red meat eaten in future in favour of other sources of protein, whether it be other animal, fish, insect, plant or even laboratory based. There will still be lots of plant based protein consumed & we need to make it, though not at any cost.
Basically, I see an opportunity to farm better and still produce what the billions of consumers want. The human race isn't about to change to your Utopian dream straight away, even if you are correct, which you are.