Cropping Cycles & Trends

There are many differences between conventional and regenerative agriculture. This report maps out a typical growing season, highlighting the relative importance of common tools to each type of farm.

This is the time of year when the seeders get rolling! Spend any amount of time on agtwitter/X and your feed will be full of snapshots like this, celebrating the start of the growing season.

In some cases, seeding isn’t the first field activity that happens in spring. ‘Pre-seed burnoff’ is spraying a non-selective herbicide (which kills everything) before planting the crop, to start with as ‘clean’ (weed-free) a field as possible.

The alternative to herbicide is tillage. ‘No-till’ farms rely more heavily on herbicides, while ‘organic’ farms (prohibited by certification criteria from applying chemical crop inputs) use tillage to prepare seedbeds ahead of planting, and to protect the cash crop from weeds overtaking it.