'Tis the Season to Talk About Tillage

This time last year, 8 people were killed in vehicle pileup in Illinois caused by poor visibility in a dust storm from soil blown off nearby heavily tilled fields.

Thankfully, cover cropping interest and awareness continues to grow. Unfortunately, excessive tillage is still a big problem that creates even bigger air and water pollution in increasingly extreme weather conditions.

This video does an excellent job of outlining the way that cover crops can be substituted for spring and fall tillage, and how to do it to succeed in achieving a preset goal for the field. It’s complicated, and fascinating.

Like everything in agriculture and nature, neither ‘tillage’… nor ‘cover cropping’… nor any other activity that farmers do on their land can be judged in isolation. Everything interacts, impacting the efficacy of subsequent field management practices, in a range of beneficial and harmful ways.