No-Till Could Help Maintain Crop Yields Despite Climate Change (but not indefinitely)

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr/2012/120823.htm

[font face=Serif][font size=5]No-Till Could Help Maintain Crop Yields Despite Climate Change[/font]

By Ann Perry
August 23, 2012

[font size=3]Reducing tillage for some Central Great Plains crops could help conserve water and reduce losses caused by climate change, according to studies at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Research leader Laj Ahuja and others at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Agricultural Systems Research Unit at Fort Collins, Colo., superimposed climate projections onto 15 to 17 years of field data to see how future crop yields might be affected. ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency, and this work supports the USDA priority of responding to climate change.

The field data was collected at the ARS Central Great Plains Research Station in Akron, Colo. The projections included an increase in equivalent atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels from 380 parts per million by volume (ppmv) in 2005 to 550 ppmv in 2050. The projections also included a 5-degree Fahrenheit increase in summer temperatures in Colorado from 2005 to 2050. The ARS scientists used these projections to calculate a linear increase of CO2 and temperature from 2050 to 2100.

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Ahuja also simulated earlier planting dates and no-till management to see if either change reduced yield losses, but only the no-till option helped. In the wheat-fallow rotation with no tillage, wheat yields were higher than with conventional tillage through 2075. But by 2100, when summer temperatures had increased by 8 degrees F, even the no-till yield advantage was lost.

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http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/AR/archive/aug12/cropland0812.htm
http://www.springer.com/earth+sciences+and+geography/atmospheric+sciences/journal/10584

[Kolesar]

1. Does "no till" necessarily mean using Roundup/glyphospate? eom

[NickB79]

2. Not neccessarily

No-till is a bit of a misnomer. You still run equipment over the ground to break up dirt clods and tear up weeds, but they're set very shallow so that just the first inch or two of soil is disturbed. No-till refers to the fact that you aren't turning over the deep soils every year. There are organic, no-till farming operations that work in just this manner. It's more labor-intensive, and requires more fuel for running the tractors multiple times through the field rather than a single pass with herbicides, but it can be done.

[Kolesar]

3. Use a "chisel plow"?

I read a long while ago in a gardening book about how a farmer can pull a plow through the soil that does not turn the soil over, it just aerates the soil. I don't know if it was a chisel plow, though.

[OKIsItJustMe]

4. Absolutely not

http://rodaleinstitute.org/no-till_revolution

[font face=Serif][font size=5]No-Till Revolution[/font]

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Organic farming has relied heavily on tillage for weed control. And conventional no-till techniques depend entirely on herbicides for weed control and effective cover crop kill. The question has been how to make the benefits of no-till accessible to organic farmers and how to free conventional farmers from the expensive and toxic chemicals. Organic no-till is based on sound biological principles and mechanical cover-crop kill, making it possible to reduce and even eliminate tillage.

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