No-till farming reduces need for fertilizers and pesticides, and promotes soil health.
Since the first farmers tilled the soil more than 10,000 years ago, the plow has been the essential tool of human survival.
In the Bible, Isaiah told the people to beat their swords into ploughshares. In ancient Rome, Cincinnatus resigned as dictator to return to his plow. Chaucer gave us the "Plowman's Tale" as part of the Canterbury Tales. And in every generation, the plow, pulled by hand, by oxen or by tractor, has sustained civilization.
So it is nothing short of revolutionary that, in our time, the plow is heading toward extinction, or something close to it.
The demise of the plow and other tools that turn the soil is a rare good-news story in these depressing times for Planet Earth. Modern, mechanized tillage had become an ecological disaster, killing all that was alive in the soil while worsening erosion and runoff. But this is all changing, primarily because farmers recognize the economic benefits -- less fertilizer and diesel fuel to buy, lower labor costs, higher crop yields and profits -- that can come with no-till farming or reduced tillage. As a felicitous byproduct, the replacement of traditional tilling, particularly when combined with other "regenerative" agricultural practices, is restoring soil health to tens of millions of acres. Even accounting for the increased herbicide use that often comes with no-till farming, this is a boon to flora and fauna throughout the ecosystem.
The shift has been gradual, but sweeping over time. In 1973, 82.2 percent of U.S. cropland was managed by conventional tillage, according to the Agriculture Department, and only 2 percent was managed by "no-till" methods, with the remaining 15.8 percent using reduced tillage. Half a century later, only 27 percent of U.S. cropland uses conventional tillage, with 38 percent now using no-till and 35 percent using reduced tillage, according to the USDA's 2022 agricultural census, released last year. The acreage under conventional tillage dropped by 8 percent between 2017 and 2022 alone.
Some of the regenerative practices involve newer technologies, such as drilling seeds into the soil to preserve the soil's structure. Many other practices return to traditional farming methods that existed for centuries before chemical fertilizers and pesticides took over the industry in the second half of the 20th century: cover crops, crop rotation, hedgerows, mixed farming, rotational grazing and the like.
If Big Ag destroyed the soil with its heavy use of chemicals and monster tilling equipment, the new agriculture is about building soil health so that it can nurture as it once did. "We are trying to remember everything we'd forgotten about farming," says Rick Clark, who farms 7,000 acres of alfalfa, corn, soybeans and more in Indiana. Healthier soil makes farmland more resilient during droughts and floods. And while conventional tilling releases carbon into the atmosphere, regenerative farming sequesters it in the ground.
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"It's a very good trend -- an excellent trend," says John Piotti, head of the American Farmland Trust, which has been working on regenerative practices with big and small farmers and food companies including Land O'Lakes and General Mills. For those urban dwellers who don't know why they should care about tilling methods or soil biomass, Piotti puts it this way: "It's really about whether we're going to have a planet we can live on."
On my own "farm" -- I put it in quotes because I primarily grow weeds -- I'm using no-till techniques to plant wildflowers and other native plants in the hayfields. For a sense of how a real farmer does it, I went to visit Michael Sands, who raises cattle, goats, sheep, pigs and chickens nearby at Bean Hollow Grassfed on 100 rolling acres in Rappahannock County, Virginia. As I arrived at the farm, Sands's lone farmhand, Amanda, was opening a new pasture for the ewes, who practically stampeded into the fresh field to devour its forage. Newborn lambs, some of them just hours old, wobbled after them. There was hay for the ewes in the new pasture, and about one-quarter of them started eating it. But the rest stood pawing at the snow and eating the grass they found beneath.
Eating fresh grass, in January, after a snowstorm? This is regenerative agriculture in action.
Conventional farmers plow their fields every few years to "renovate" their hayfields and pastures. They might use hundreds of pounds of fertilizer per acre to yield enough hay for the animals. They would probably spray herbicide to remove the plants that the animals don't, or shouldn't, eat. And they would feed their animals hay all winter.
And Sands? I asked him when he last tilled his fields. "We don't own a plow," he replied. He doesn't buy any fertilizer -- yet his fields yield as much grass as farmers who use 200 pounds of fertilizer per acre. He uses no pesticides, and herbicides only where needed to keep vines from growing on his fences. And his animals get 70 to 80 percent of their diet from grazing all winter long; in a non-drought year, it can get closer to 100 percent.
Sands achieves this with intensive, rotational grazing. Using portable fences, he divides his 100 acres of grasslands into as many as 76 mini pastures, and he puts all his animals -- cattle, sheep, goats -- in the same pasture for a day or so. Once they have devoured or trampled everything in the field, he then moves the animals to the next pasture, while the just-grazed pasture gets 75 days to recover. "I'm feeding the soil by allowing the plant matter to grow," he explains, and his grasses have such healthy roots that there are "as many pounds of biomass below soil as above it." The soil gets fertilized further by the animals' manure and the plant residue. The animals get a plentiful, diverse diet of about 15 species of grass and 10 broadleaf species. And Sands's "input" costs -- labor, fuel, fertilizer, hay -- are so low that his farm store can sell steak for less than Whole Foods does.
He's not going to be able to sell hamburger anywhere near as cheap as Safeway -- he's counting on customers willing to pay more for organic, locally sourced meat -- but that's because Safeway's prices don't include the cost of all the pollution and planetary destruction its meat generates. That's a "fake price," Sands says.
The Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute has been studying farms such as Bean Hollow Grassfed as part of its Virginia Working Landscapes initiative, and it has found that the type of grazing Sands uses, by promoting more year-round ground cover and more plant and insect biodiversity, leads to birds more successfully fledging their young. It also expects to find, in studies currently underway, that the practices enhance microbiomes both in the soil and in the guts of the farm animals. "It's very much a win-win for agricultural production and bird populations," says Amy Johnson, who runs the initiative.
Given the benefits, it's a bit surprising that more farms haven't converted to regenerative agriculture. Though reduced tillage is now common, other regenerative methods are not. Cover crops, for example, are used on only about 5 percent of American cropland, even though they both fertilize the soil and reduce weeds (thereby reducing the need for herbicides). One reason is the cost of converting. It can take a few years for farmers to produce similar yields after they switch to regenerative practices, and they sometimes need new equipment -- things most farmers can't afford on their notoriously slim margins.
Federal cost-share programs help farmers make the transition, and President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act pumped an extra $20 billion into such conservation programs -- but congressional Republicans are threatening to rescind $14 billion of that funding -- and, because of President Donald Trump's extralegal executive orders, the funds could be cut off at any moment. Leave it to these guys to kill something that is both good for farmers and good for the Earth.
Rappahannock County is hilly and rocky, so there's not much crop farming here. To see that, drive south a few hours to Franklin County, where fifth-generation farmer Daniel Austin farms 400 tillable acres -- but does no tilling. "The last time I personally pulled a tilling tool was 2005," he says.
He grows barley, oats, wheat, corn, soybeans and other crops using no-till planting, cover crops, mixed farming (sheep graze his fields in between plantings) and other regenerative practices, for one reason above all others: "This is because of economics." Soil in the region is sandy and shallow, and tillage over the years had removed the organic matter. "Yields had plateaued, and then if we had a dry year, or a wet spring, it would just be a mess," Austin says. "We had no real resilience built into the system." They would pour more chemical fertilizer into the soil to replace the lost nutrients, but the soil would become "deader and deader and deader," he says. "What really fixed that problem was the idea of being able to have living roots in the soil 365 days a year."
For Austin, business has been good. That's in part because he runs a direct-to-consumer business (his customers are other farms) and his East Coast customers pay less for shipping than if they bought from the Midwest. He says most other producers in his area have similarly shifted to regenerative agriculture, and he's proud of the ecological contribution he's making. "It's really exciting to be a part of that," he says. But can he compete on price with big producers from the farm belt? "In my opinion, no," Austin admits.
Clark, from Indiana, isn't so sure about that. Also a fifth-generation farmer, he has taken regenerative farming about as far as it can go: no tilling, no insecticides, no herbicides, no synthetic fertilizers. His diesel fuel consumption is down 50 percent since he converted from conventional techniques. When he converted fields to regenerative practices, "our yields dropped 30 percent right off the bat," he says. But now, his profits are higher because of the reduced cost and because his organic corn commands a price that is double that of conventional corn, and his soybeans get 120 percent higher prices. Along the way, "we sold off all our tillage equipment because we didn't need it any more."
Clark doubts the plow will disappear entirely. Though he thinks all grain and soybean farming will eventually be no-till, there still is no good substitute for turning the soil when planting tomatoes, onions or certain other vegetables. And if the standard of success is getting food to the consumer at the lowest possible price, he says, "I cannot compete with the conventional farmer." But even conventional farmers, Clark figures, could boost their profits by deploying a hybrid approach. If they used regenerative techniques, they could eliminate 50 percent of the fertilizer and other chemicals they use while still increasing yields. That means lower costs and higher production.
It also means the start of a virtuous ecological cycle. The soil, no longer turned up year after year, comes back to life, and is packed with earthworms, beneficial microorganisms and minerals. This promotes extensive root growth and better water retention. Reduced runoff helps aquatic animals, and the healthier crops provide better shelter for small mammals and birds, which in turn provides food for animals all the way up the food chain.
Of his own farm, Clark says, "this is very hard and it's very rare that people do this extreme." It's not realistic to think that every acre of every farm could go to 100 percent regenerative agriculture. "But I think I could go just about anywhere in the world and reduce inputs by 35 percent," he estimates. Farmers would save untold billions of dollars in fuel, fertilizer and pesticides -- and, along the way, they just might save the planet.