Re: No-till gardening
Rebecca Lance wrote:
> Two years ago, my husband and I bought a 5 acre parcel in the Sierra
> foothills. It consists of red adobe clay . . .
> I amended the areas I wanted to set up as immediate garden beds, and layed
> chips over those I planned to till up in the future.
>
> The beds I amended are still struggling. The areas I laid chips over, (and
> some of these were horrible) have been completely transformed. The soil is
> now darker and looser in color for several feet down.
Rebecca, did you keep the chips you piled on top of the soil moist? (it being
very dry in the foothills except in winter).
Well, this is another testimonial for no-till. I'm still a bit skeptical, or
at least impatient, and don't want to have to wait until the amendment breaks
down before using the area. So far I have used material that is very well
broken down before adding it to the soil, and I only have a small patch, so the
labor is not that much. I have obtained totally usable soil that way, almost
instantly. I'd still be tempted to compost the added material, and then dig it
in anyway. I am tempted to try no-till on a test plot on a friend's land -
much the same climate as yours.
I have been very intrigued by this no-till approach, and after reading Moira's
posts, especially about the Israel farm tests, can see how the technique could
be a useful one. If it works, as it seems to have for you, then it seems like
a good method. I wonder if it could ever be applied to commercial scale
farming, however. Getting out the handy spreadsheet program, it took but a few
minutes to calculate that to apply an 8" layer of organic material (say manure)
to a farm of 1000 acres (a standard size farm in California (and in the US
midwest, where I am from), would take slightly over 822,000 cubic meters of
manure. That is the equivalent of a 100 meter square (the size of 2 american
football fields) pile, 82 meters tall, or the height of a 26 story building. I
don't know the size of the average daily bovine deposit, or the amount that
will fit in a truck, but it sounds like 1000's of truckloads and maybe millions
of cow-days, just for 1 farm; an immense amount of trucking to move it around,
and labor to spread it on the farm. (And maybe cow manure is inappropriate,
and not used today, because it has a high quantity of salts - that is the
conventional wisdom, anyway). If it were wood chips being used, where could
they all come from? Now that farms don't have horses anymore, and a need to
dispose of that manure, is it any wonder that farmers have gone to chemical
fertilizers?
