So many buzzwords are tossed around these days with very little of the real definition behind their use: fair, equality, injustice, warrior, rights, conservation, environmental conscious, etc. It gets a little mind numbing after a while when folks use these words to push their political agenda rather than the actual definition of them.

So, in paying homage to Encyclopedia Brittanica, I'm going to dedicate this post to the underdogs. The forgotten masses. The organisms that so far outnumber almost every other single entity on this Earth save individual cells that it's an injustice that they have no voice.

All environmentally conscious social justice warriors should be taking up their keyboards to help these poor indiviuals find their voices. It's not fair that for the last 5000 years that these things have been repeatedly oppressed, killed, and transplanted by the trillions once, nay, two or three times every year!

They don't just get walked on, they get trampled down, blown away, blown up, defecated on, laid on, drilled in, and chopped up. I'm not talking about some indigenous people we've never heard of, no, I'm talking about the microbes in the dirt.

That's right, dirt. The smelly uncle nobody likes to talk about who just eats dead plants and farts oxygen all day. Dirt.

Most of the joking aside, I have to confess that I believe that farmers have historically gone the wrong direction with how they farm. With one horse and a single bottom plow, they turned the soil but didn't do a massive amount of plowing because they couldn't. With the invention of mechanical horsepower (aka tractors), farmers have largely sought the black, powdery, significantly stirred soil for a seed bed. Many, if not most, still do much mechanical tillage and stir the soil a lot.

No big deal, right? Dirt is dirt, right? That's not true. Soil is alive. Very alive, in fact. It is made up of innumerable numbers of organisms, bacteria, bugs, worms, fungi, etc., and calling it an ecosystem is not a stretch.

So we go in with our plow or tillage implement and stir the soup a bit. No big deal, right? Maybe, maybe not. Here's a list of some interesting things that happen when you till your soil:

1. You incorporate, or add, any plant material that was on top of the soil into the soil. This puts it in contact with the soil bacteria to decompose faster.

2. You destroy root systems of plants, both living and dead, which also speeds decomposition and eliminates current weed populations.

3. You destroy worms. Repeated tilling will eventually eliminate a lot of the larger biologicals in your soil. Good or bad, the larger biologicals suffer from mechanical disturbance.

4. You destroy or, at a minimum, disturb bacteria and biological mechanisms for nutrient cycling and recycling.

5. You get a nice dose of dopamine when you look behind you and see a nice black field that you just tilled.

Incorporating organic material by itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Speeding decomposition isn't necessarily a bad thing, either. But at what cost? Items 2-4 address the cost. Destroying root systems has the following side effects:

1. You eliminate means for water infiltration. Decayed roots leave a hole in the soil for rain to collect and be stored. The roots can also can "soak up" water if they haven't decayed yet.

2. You break the organic structure that keeps soil loose and aerated when you destroy root systems. Tilling, though providing a short term solution to compaction, actually causes more compaction in the long term because there is nothing left to keep the soil from becoming like concrete. Roots in the soil, after decaying, also leave air pockets, or tunnels for new roots to venture down, etc. Tilling destroys all of these air pockets.

The only real benefit from tilling is that it eliminates immediate weed pressure, temporarily. I'll come back to this point and how it relates to sustainability.

Everyone knows that worms are good for your soil. Tilling really hurts worms. A healthy soil has lots of worms. Worms also leave air pockets and means for water infiltration. Again, tilling will eliminate the benefit from worm tunnels. End of story on that point.

Nutrient cycling is what soil is designed to do. A growing plant is actually able to signal bacteria around its roots to provide something the plant needs. The bacteria responds with providing more food, disease resistance, etc. A decomposing plant can provide nutrients to the next plant that grows in the area IF there is adequate biologicals present to process the decomposing plant into usable nutrients by the time the next plant needs the nutrients. (There is an additional factor related to the time to decompose called the Carbon to Nitrogen ratio, but that's for another discussion.)

I don't know jack about mycorrhizal fungi, but I know that this fungi creates a network in the soil that is key to nutrient transportation. Tilling also destroys this network. Will it rebuild itself? Yes. But tilling, in terms of mycorrhizal fungi, is the equivalent to having a food truck at one end of your interstate, needing to get to the other side of the state to hungry people, then bombing the crap out of the interstate and telling the waiting people that help is on the way. It takes time to rebuild that network and yearly tilling will never allow it to rebuild enough to effectively cycle nutrients. Check out this link: httpso.gl/search/Mycorrhiza

That dose of dopamine? I can't help you there. Recreational tillers will maybe have to switch to playing FarmSim or something to make themselves feel good after spring planting. My dad has had to deal with the love of a freshly tilled field but he also doesn't like the dust, loss of moisture, and hours spent in the tractor for conventional tillage.

We at KD Farms switched to no-till in spring 2017. We're newbies for sure, but so far, we are sold on the concept. Our sandy soils aren't blowing away in the spring when we plant and we've seen bumps in yield and water retention already.

I'm going to talk about sustainability and regenerative farming in subsequent posts because this one is getting too long. I'll even discuss some organic farming practices and potentially offend people. It's ok to be offended though. We're all adults here. I'll link to them here when they're finished.

What do you think? Makes sense? Am I blowing smoke? Leave your comments here for discussion.

Be blessed

-Kenny

PS. Do your own research, look at lots of sources with different bias, and form your own opinions. These are mine that I formed after several hundred hours of research.

This is winter forage wheat, Austrian peas, and radishes planted into dill weed stubble. No tilling was performed between harvesting the dill and the planting.

Sustainable, Regenerative, and Organic, Oh My! A Soil Health Perspective (and a little satire)