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Compaction is sublinear with weight, make the tractor heavier so it combacts more makes a small difference where the tires are - but you can now pull something bigger (assuming horsepower) and that means less of the field is touched by tires and in turn less compaction. compaction is worse where the tires touch but they touch less.

the above is also why tires are better than tracks in many cases. The tire has more compaction, but when you turn it touches less land and so overall is better than a track.

of course every soil is different. For details of you particular land you need an expert who knows your soil.

I often do to, so this reply is not a criticism of your general point, however in this case your would have been better informed to read the actual thing and not the comment you replied to!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47529291

So you'll get completely wrong info from Dunning-Kruger effected HN commenters/LLM slopbots?

I thought that was always the case. Dig as required to get your soil to the correct type for what you want to grow, then let it be and don't dig.

Digging to turn the soil seems like an old adage that has been passed down through generations, but modern scientific studies are now showing it provides very little to no benefit for yields.

> Trying to start a no dig garden in some heavily compacted, organic-poor, heavy clay soil is going to lead to extreme disappointment.

If you start with Charles Dowdings 6 inches of compost on top, that is not necessarily true. The soil comes to life as worms go mad pulling that compost down into the soil.

It actually works rather well. Year 1 can be very good. Year 2 even better.

The real disappointment in Year 1 is the amount of weeds that find 6 inches of compost no barrier at all! With digging you can get a lot of perennial weed roots out, and hoe off the annuals. With no dig you have to pull them.

I'm not a idealogue, so actually suggest glyphosate before compost...but people don't normally like that suggestion.

Man, I wish I had access to heavily compacted, organic-poor, heavy-clay soil. It's the 80% rock that makes even basic tasks a day-long chore.

"Trying to start a no dig garden in some heavily compacted, organic-poor, heavy clay soil is going to lead to extreme disappointment".

For sure. In Dowdings method you put a quite thick layer of compost on top of the existing soil. You then top up the compost every year.

We call that New Jersey here!

I have a really hard time believing someone can keep all other variables constant for 8 years to definitively say that yields will be better because of switching to no-till, rather than any other multitude of factors.

For context: The guy is called Fukuoka and it is the best book I read last year: https://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Permaculture/The_One_St...

Considering the amount of fungicide/pesticide needed even (especially?) for organic fruit, it would be suboptimal.

And/or tarp to occultate the weeds and dormant seedstock

Sounds great, let’s have more of that!

They've got some robots that do it already, targeting weeds with lasers.

Noted(?). Um: did you mean to comment on the main post instead of my comment? I'm only talking about futuristic pixel-grid stuff related to the fiberoptics advancement, so I'm not quite sure what questions to ask here about the bulk of your response re: soil biome management; is there some connection I’m missing? Perhaps: Are there already tilling solutions that can do one square yard only, to whatever specified depth, in use at this winery?

Both are good. Clarkson's Farm is surprisingly accurate.

Thank you for the explanation, now the article is available to read, it has stopped being HN hugged to death.

Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort: you just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil and then dump seed in it. No-till requires things like “tracking the soil’s water retention levels”, “planting cover crops or even giving a field a year off”, and other such steps that in general can be summarized as “cost centers”.

Given the economic climate, few non-corporate farmers can afford that investment without the collapse of their farm, and few corporate farmers (none at nationwide scale, afaik) are willing to invest in cost centers that threaten to decrease, rather than increase, their rate of profit growth year-over-year. One could absolutely make a case that regulatory investment in such things be imposed upon megacorp farms first, with their processes and technology made available by subsidy to smaller farms; it would be enough to structure the subsidy as inversely proportional to the acreage reaped for value, with some language ensuring that the cost of investment into land farmed by contract to a megacorp is paid to the land operator. To prevent certain abuses, they’d also have to modify farming contract law to make maintaining long-term use of the land an inalienable right, so that unsustainable output-quota farming contracts are unenforceable.

This is an unlikely outcome in the U.S., but I still appreciate the researches providing more evidence in support of it.

The other replies make fair points, but tillage does still have it's uses.

Quick examples:

  - Inversion tillage (ploughing) to bury green manure crops or bulky organic manure
  - Subsoiling (deep tillage) can help break underground compaction, to allow better root penetration
  - Working with soils prone to surface capping

  - Full inversion tillage
  - Low/min-till
  - No-till

EDIT: This is a response to the question "why do it?" rather than anything in the context of the article itself.

No till requires access to first world country technology to make work. No till in the United States and similar countries is very very very established practice. It's not less work by any means, it's just a different kind of work with different machinery.

Source: was full time farmer until Grandpa died.

I'm guessing less developed countries still till the soil? I have no idea.

In short term profits vs long term benefits, we all know who wins.

If you want to till, you need quite a big tractor that burns quite a lot of diesel to drag a cultivator through the soil. This is not the same as a plough, but at some point you'll end up ploughing.

Go and stick a spade in your garden and then try and drag it sideways. Yeah, not easy, eh? Bit too much to do by hand.

If you want to do "no till", you can get away with a less powerful tractor because you don't need to drag a cultivator through the soil, you just need one that can carry a 400 litre sprayer that blasts glyphosate all over everything every couple of weeks.

Eventually all that's left are the glyphosate-resistant plants that are choking out your crops.

And that's if your soil conditions are actually in any way suitable for no-till, which they often aren't.

Because no-till doesn't scale. It's incredible for market gardening to feed the rich who can pay a premium at a farmers market, but it's not going to feed the world.

You should maybe do a bit more reading on what Marx actually said and promoted versus what the USSR actually did in practice. Farming co-ops have been growing consistently since from before you were born, and is the most direct example of Marx's economic ideals in practice.

The USSR and Maoist China did nothing to follow Marxist principles, that was just their leadership's political scape goat to do whatever they wanted because they knew people weren't going to actually read Marx's works. The actual communists that followed Marxist principles are the ones that coined the term "tankies" to call out their leaders and their supporters for abandoning Marxist philosophy. You might as well talk shit about democracy and point at North Korea because they obviously must represent democracy, its in the name of their country and they talk about how awesome their elections are every year.

Also, what someone's overall economic ideals and philosophy amount to has fuck all to do with what are the best farming practices.