Overall, the nodig plot harvest 10% more. but here's where it gets interesting. those yields were not uniformly spread across the vegetable types. if you dig into the data, you'll see, some did quite worse with dig and some did quite better. guess which ones did better on dig? Potatoes, Rutabagas, carrots and parsnips and cabbage all did better in Dig! roughly to the tune of about Potatoes 21%, carrots 21%, Rutabaga 14%, Cabbage, 11%, broad beans 10% better. it's all published in his books. Everything else did better with no dig. Shallots especially did 33% better with no-dig, ales 21% better, onions 22% better with no dig.
On the con side, no-till trades diesel for spray costs.
Other arguments for tilling exist: aeration, mixing-in of new organic content/fertilizer (not really necessary: green waste can just be dumped at surface level in many cases, and this is already becoming more common in mass-agriculture with 'cover crops'), furrow-creation for seed planting, etc.
Fundamentally, leaving a field uncovered for any length of time is bad and destroys the soil more than if you'd just let it grow weeds or a temporary crop for awhile then culled that as in-place fertilizer for a next crop.
A few months ago some friends of mine visited Australia from overseas and I took them to one of the older wineries in the area. The winery manages something like 10-20 major fields. They brought in a new viticulturalist to manage the fields and the first thing he did was introduce cover crops. In the tasting, they brought out soil cores from before and after the changes, which had only been in place for two years. The difference was tremendous. The old methods, unquestioned for decades, left the soil dry, poor, and largely infertile. The new methods restored organic matter, moisture retention, and a significant sub-surface biome.
I have around 45 acres of heavy clay, poor agricultural land, which would look very similar to that if we allowed heavy machinery, or even an ATV, on it when it is sodden.
Maybe they knew a thing or two (low earthquake zone, it has to be said)
I mean even Karl Marx talked a ton about soil health and while he mostly talked about "metabolic rift" not tilling (that I know about) specifically it seems like a similar focus on short term output vs long term soil health.
I guess I'm just not clear on if there is actually a new serious problem being "revealed" as the title says or just being substantiated further.
https://www.washington.edu/news/2026/03/19/earthquake-scient...
At the very least it adds a new vector to the position. I was also unaware of how receptive to disruption fiber optic cables were. So, at least I learned that.
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.
There are a lot of different combinations of variables done for both tilling and not tilling depending on many factors.
Even the old testament talks about letting the land sit fallow for a whole year, so thousands not just hundreds of years.
No-Till is one of those ideas like permaculture or Modern Monetary Theory that attracts emphatic advocates while going against conventional practice. It isn’t clear why it would just be being adopted now if it actually worked. Do you have any actual experience farming?
What evidently does NOT work is the quite new practice of industrial tilling and fertilizer, which is causing rapid breakdown of our natural environment and future potential for food production.
The industrial practices that have enable us to feed a population of 8 billion, with surplus - a lot of food is thrown out as waste because we have so much of it we really don’t have to be super strict with it.
The industrial practices that have allowed the majority of the population to do something other than be directly involved in agriculture.
What part of that isn’t working?
The sky is falling, co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks.
We’ve been told these things for, what, at least sixty years now.
Now we can add A.I. will de-employment everyone.
I don’t believe any of it.
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.
And tillage can work well by bringing up nutrients. Some crops will do this themselves to an extent, or you can plant forage crops for a time that will bring up nutrients. But subsoiling to break deep compaction or simply bring up phosphorus or potassium from lower levels can breathe new life into a field.
Source: was full time farmer until Grandpa died.
I'm guessing less developed countries still till the soil? I have no idea.
> There is also grass cover that is planted after the main crop season, that is later grazed
Grazing compacts the soil, making it impossible to plant in without tilling. So no, this isn't workable.