More Soil Benefits from No-Till
Planting By Don
Comis January 27, 2004
No-till crops like wheat and peas can be grown without undue
erosion on land that has been rested in grass under the federal Conservation
Reserve Program (CRP),
according to a 6-year study by Agricultural
Research Service scientists.
CRP lands are often judged to be highly erodible. No-till
planting minimizes erosion because crop seeds are planted directly through the
plant residue left from the previous crop, without plowing the field.
Soil scientists Donald L. Tanaka, Stephen D. Merrill and
colleagues at the ARS Northern Great
Plains Research Laboratory in Mandan, N. Dak., began their study in 1994 on
plots laid out on former wheatfields that had been seeded to a grass-alfalfa
mixture under the CRP program in 1989.
In 2000, Merrill, Chi-hua Huang, a soil scientist with the ARS
National Soil
Erosion Research Lab in West Lafayette, Ind., and others twice repeated a
3-year rotation of spring wheat, winter wheat and dry pea for a total of six
growing seasons.
First, they grew the crops under both no-till and moderate
conventional disk tilling. Then they used rainfall simulation equipment to
compare the soil erosion that occurred with each of those tillage methods, with
erosion caused on plots left in grass and harvested for hay once a year.
The researchers found that growing the crops with no-till caused
no more erosion than occurred when grass was harvested annually for hay. They
also showed that both the land cropped with a wheat-pea rotation under no-till
and CRP grassland annually harvested for hay had one-sixth as much erosion as
did land cropped with moderate conventional tillage.
ARS is USDA's chief scientific
research agency. |