No-till Vs. Conventional tillage agriculture essays

No-till Vs. Conventional tillage agriculture essays 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 1940s, 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 didnt really catch on. By the early 1970s only eight percent of all agriculture land was being farmed using conservation tillage but by the early 1980s about thirty percent of the United states agriculture land was managed using conservation tillage. By 2010 it is predicted that 75 to 85 percent of our nations farmland will be under no-till management (Gorman, 117) Why the sudden increase in the adoption of no till? Several factors timed the shift from plow tillage to conservation tillage over the last 25 years these include availability of effective and safe herbicides, increase in energy costs, decrease in available farm labor, and growing public concern over soil and water conservation and environmental pollution (Gorman, 117). But perh...