alt.hn

3/25/2026 at 2:12:04 PM

Earthquake scientists reveal how overplowing weakens soil at experimental farm

 https://www.washington.edu/news/2026/03/19/earthquake-scientists-reveal-how-overplowing-weakens-soil-at-experimental-farm/

by Brajeshwar

3/26/2026 at 5:05:11 AM

Just to be clear, plowing and tilling are not the same thing, and this article implies the researchers might be using it interchangeably. They bundle different soil-disturbance practices together, irrelevant of their uses, and potential compaction impact. Of course, tilling can also just be used as a generic term for all of the soil management in farms, but this is never explained.

It is also unclear if the paper is removing traffic compaction or it is part of their results. when an MF 8700 with 23,800 pounds rolls around it will compact things. A lot. I have a lunch box to prove it.

Would love to see no-till vs shallow till vs deep plowing. For this paper, they should have introduce and have primary conclusion around the technical data gathering as a novel idea, not draw conclusion from the collected data.

The physics and sensing seems rigorous. Understanding of agricultural taxonomy, farming, is coarse at best. 40 hours of total data during rain is a wee bit short. 2cm depth for the fiber is only going to sense near- or surface. Most crops go deeper than that. Single-site experiment on a single type of soil is very narrow.

To me, plowing (like a chisel plow or moldboard) is to break up soil, and 'folds' old crop like corn stalks back in. It is also the first step for never-used land prep for growing stuff. Usually, beginning of season, compacting, or new site. 8 to 20 inches deep. can flip the soil upside down.

Tilling gets the soil ready for seed, aeration, crumble large lumps and fill larger gaps on the surface, or mix fertilizer/compost into soil. 4 to 12 inches deep.

Discing aka harrowing (disc harrow) usually will cut the remaining roots a few inches deep, often done post plowing. good for putting last years leftovers just a few inches under. 4 to 6 inches.

Note that it seems that as the field size gets smaller, the tilling vs harrowing seems to flip? At least how people consider using them.

(edit: I am all over with this one, but I think the gist comes through.)

by WaitWaitWha

3/26/2026 at 11:46:20 AM

If you check the paper, it doesn't say "plowing" anywhere. Just tilling. And these are the parameters:

> Tillage had been applied at three depths commonly used in farming—no tillage, 10 cm, and 25 cm—while compaction had been imposed using two tire pressure levels—70 kPa for both front and rear tires, and 120 kPa for front and 150 kPa for rear tires.

by tecleandor

3/26/2026 at 7:57:48 AM

What one has to keep in mind as well, that even though tractors are really heavy they spread that weight across a large area (using low tire pressures and having massive tires to begin with). So, iirc, the per area impact is even lower then a human. It impacts a lot larger area, though!

Plowing vs tilling is also very much about soil erosion and depends very much of the location you are in.

by universa1

3/26/2026 at 11:49:36 AM

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.

by bluGill

3/26/2026 at 8:53:41 AM

This is why I try to look at the HN comments first. Then, maybe look at the article.

by bell-cot

3/26/2026 at 12:31:15 PM

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

by swores

3/26/2026 at 2:11:04 PM

Yeah. But with a finite lifetime, and an effectively infinite supply of content on the internet - quick & dirty attention-rationing algorithms are unavoidable.

by bell-cot

3/26/2026 at 3:46:32 PM

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

by turtlesdown11

3/26/2026 at 11:09:53 AM

[dead]

by speefers

3/26/2026 at 11:07:54 AM

[dead]

by speefers

3/25/2026 at 10:43:43 PM

to till or not to till, that's the question. one way to look at is check the yields that result from dig vs no dig. Charles dowding did exactly that. for seven years he had two plots, one where he dug and one where he didn't. in each one he added the same amount of compost and grew teh same crops on both sides.

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.

by heathrow83829

3/25/2026 at 11:38:21 PM

The no dig method has taken on a life of its own, almost a religion. It's probably a mistake for most people though. "One dig" is almost always going to be superior, given soil that has never been used for gardening before. Trying to start a no dig garden in some heavily compacted, organic-poor, heavy clay soil is going to lead to extreme disappointment.

by chongli

3/26/2026 at 10:48:31 AM

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.

by cyberjar

3/26/2026 at 12:48:02 AM

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.

by hansvm

3/26/2026 at 4:46:57 AM

A friend of mine retired from the military and moved to my neck of the woods in the Ozarks. Having lived in Eastern North Carolina for most of his 20 years in, he had gotten used to sandy soil with nary a rock. Prior to that, he was in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and I don't think he dug many holes there.

After closing on their new house he asked me for a shovel, for which to install a mailbox. Of course I'd help my friend out. "Sure, buddy!" I said. "Here's a shovel, post-hole digger, pickax and a rock-bar. That should get the job done." After I explained to him that yes, you need a 20 pound pointy chunk of steel to dig any sizable hole around here, he still didn't quite believe me. However, once he got the mailbox planted, he adjusted his beliefs accordingly.

On the rare occasion that I have to dig a hole somewhere with actual dirt, I always find myself amazed at how easy it is. Those times help me understand scenes in TV or movies that include someone digging a hole. Those scenes don't ever depict someone deciding to move whatever it is they're putting in the ground because they hit a massive stone at 8 inches into a 24 inch hole, and there ain't any getting through it. The scenes don't depict the Herculean effort required to just plant a tree. Those shows don't show the absolutely back-breaking labor it takes to be a landscaper around here. And before I had the chance to do the same kind of work in actual soil, those scenes just didn't make sense.

by vlachen

3/26/2026 at 9:57:39 AM

Our house sits on a small basalt volcanic plug and the solid dark rock lurks not very far under our garden - 100m north of us and its sandstone, 100m south and it is limestone.

Digging a hole of any depth would probably require explosives!

by arethuza

3/26/2026 at 3:02:58 PM

I'd save a fortune on concrete and rebar if I had high quality bedrock so close.

by cucumber3732842

3/26/2026 at 11:54:55 AM

Hard pass. Karst limestone is bad enough.

by vlachen

3/26/2026 at 12:52:56 AM

The soil in my backyard has very few rocks but the clay is so hard and dense it may as well be a brick wall.

by chongli

3/26/2026 at 4:07:44 AM

When it's wet, but not saturated - like 1-2 days after a rain - you can decompact the soil with a strong metal broadfork and leave the soil in large block aggregates. This keeps the soil structure and maintains some fungal web connections. Add nutrients, wood chips, stick and sand below aggregates and in cracks. Cover with compost and plant clover to cover.

by thatcat

3/26/2026 at 9:27:25 AM

This is amazing info thank you.

What is the purpose of planting clover?

by greazy

3/26/2026 at 9:54:57 AM

Clover is a nitrogen fixing plant - used to be that you’d plant clover for a year in between other crops to make your soil fertile again.

(It’s the bacteria in the roots that do the actual nitrogen chemistry.)

by pja

3/26/2026 at 5:28:17 PM

Clover fixes nitrogen and roots help stabilize the voids in the soil. They sell seed mixes called "ground cover mix" that includes other plants and will help keep the soil from recompacting when it rains and keeps weeds at bay.

by thatcat

3/26/2026 at 2:33:11 PM

Are you sure it is just clay? Sandy clay packs even tighter than just clay: https://www.uaex.uada.edu/farm-ranch/crops-commercial-hortic...

"If you mix sand into clay, the clay particles will fill in all the open spaces between the sand particles and often the clay will act as a ‘glue’ sticking all particles together, ultimately resulting in a more dense soil."

by darkarmani

3/26/2026 at 6:32:24 PM

> 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.

by jimnotgym

3/26/2026 at 3:55:10 AM

"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.

by chairmansteve

3/26/2026 at 11:14:16 AM

Oh yeah, just top up the compost every year. Where are you getting that compost from? Wood chips you say? You'd have to denude ten acres of forest to make enough compost to Dowding one acre of field.

He's a soil vampire, sucking in fertility from somewhere else to feed his own garden.

by chabska

3/26/2026 at 6:50:03 PM

Well...we are hn so we use a website

https://getchipdrop.com/

Tree surgeons/arborists are always trying to get rid of chips

An acre? Charles Dowding is a market Gardner, not a farmer, but he has done it on a scale of a few acres.

His compost is a mixture of

1) homemade. When you are trying to expand a plot growing stuff to compost can help. Grass clippings, waste from the garden etc. This is a minor source of very good compost.

2) woodchip, see above

3) green waste. This is other people's garden waste, normally composted poorly by a local authority. You want it some time before you use it so it can compost more fully

4) farmyard/ horse manure

5) spent mushroom compost. Actually I never saw him use this, but it is very common.

One farmer I saw said the secret of no till is 'other peoples carbon', you are correct. But some people have carbon to get rid of.

by jimnotgym

3/26/2026 at 1:58:13 PM

In my parents' farm the compost comes from cleaning up the forest around it (trim branches, vegetation, dying trees, etc) mixed with the chicken and goat manure plus whatever else gets mixed in there (food leftovers, ashes, coffee grounds, etc). Of course it's at a small-ish scale (less than 1 hectare) but my parents definitely don't denude 4 hectares to do so.

by world2vec

3/26/2026 at 10:29:04 AM

Raised planters can help too

by tbossanova

3/25/2026 at 11:41:21 PM

We call that New Jersey here!

by fuzzy_biscuit

3/25/2026 at 11:55:47 PM

The dirt in my part of Virginia is almost suitable for pottery straight out of the ground. Just need to filter out the feldspar, quartz, and gold first.

by moron4hire

3/26/2026 at 3:09:21 AM

I go to my mom’s old farm and marvel at the thought of them having grown anything in that hard red ground.

by ch4s3

3/26/2026 at 2:28:47 AM

The biggest difference in no-till is water infiltration and retention. The next is ability to work land earlier with equipment that would sink in tilled soil when wet. Another is less equipment passes, for fuel use as well as owning the equipment needed to do those passes.

On the con side, no-till trades diesel for spray costs.

by ikidd

3/26/2026 at 11:52:44 AM

A general rule of thumb is when you switch corn from to to notill for the first seven years yields will be worse, but in the eighth year and after they are better.

by bluGill

3/26/2026 at 5:05:40 PM

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.

by antisthenes

3/26/2026 at 5:27:30 PM

Universities study this. They study the common corn/soybean rotation. I have no idea how they control variables - likely by having many farmers report their results and using stastics

by bluGill

3/26/2026 at 1:07:55 AM

The one straw revolution guy planted root vegetables among fruit trees in orchards I wonder if that would make a difference

by samirillian

3/26/2026 at 2:01:34 AM

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

by dimitri-vs

3/26/2026 at 11:04:47 AM

It's almost like all arable land and all arable crops aren't identical and trivially interchangeable, eh?

by ErroneousBosh

3/26/2026 at 2:49:38 AM

I think the article's theory on why people plow is wrong: it is not to let the soil hold more water, but to get rid of weeds. I know someone who did no-till for a while, and he found that you have to spray with glyphosate to keep the weeds down. Eventually the weeds that had evolved to be glyphosate-resistent spread to his area, and he had to go back to regular plowing. He said that the no-till really improved the soil, though.

by prewett

3/26/2026 at 6:26:26 AM

No-till requires to have different crop patterns, where you plant again right after harvesting to avoid weeds overgrowth.

by Saline9515

3/26/2026 at 2:58:38 PM

And/or tarp to occultate the weeds and dormant seedstock

by erikerikson

3/26/2026 at 8:51:05 AM

I think no till makes most/only sense for intensive market gardening. Where you're weeding by hand or in greenhouses and maybe applying a recurring layer of compost and maybe cover crops to prevent the soil from being bare.

by modo_mario

3/26/2026 at 10:30:11 AM

Sounds great, let’s have more of that!

by tbossanova

3/26/2026 at 11:07:46 AM

You're already complaining about the price of food, when farmers are barely breaking even on it.

You won't pay ten quid for a sustainably-farmed chicken, and I bet you're really really not going to pay ten quid for one single hand-grown ecologically-neutral farmed carrot.

And if you are, I've got some carrots for you right here. Discount if you order them in multiples of ten.

by ErroneousBosh

3/26/2026 at 11:54:39 AM

Spraying a little glyphosate emits a lot less CO2 than plowing.

by bluGill

3/26/2026 at 2:12:15 PM

Weeding actually seems like a fantastic usecase for those humanoid robots like figure, unitree, atlas etc. it’s easy and accurate plant recognition is mostly a solved problem.

by dyauspitr

3/26/2026 at 5:28:30 PM

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

by qup

3/25/2026 at 4:57:39 PM

Given the discovered ability of fiberoptics to sense water content, a kind of fiber fabric could be deployed to sense water levels across an entire field at the cubic yard level. The sensing controller would end up resembling an LCD addressing controller in reverse, with row/column/subpixel (sub-terranean-pixels!) breakout. Not that pixel-addressed farm fields are going to be efficient to work yet, lacking both processes and tooling for soil, seed, and harvest — but with sensing- and tool-assisted farming, we ought to be more able to harness the soul that we have without destroying it with the sledgehammer-nail “till the whole field” approach.

by altairprime

3/26/2026 at 2:31:58 PM

multispectral remote sensing is getting to the point where you can estimate water content of plants at the ~meter level almost from space! Drones can do higher resolution if you put sensors on them.

by datadrivenangel

3/25/2026 at 5:33:20 PM

Precision weeding is a thing. Some do it with poison, some do it with picking, some do it spraying hot oil, others do it spraying hot water. Any way you do it, it basically removes the weeding argument for tilling soil... but only if the weeds are small. If the weeds are large (think aggressive rhizomes or grasses) it wont be effective.

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.

by contingencies

3/25/2026 at 8:43:54 PM

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?

by altairprime

3/26/2026 at 2:13:17 PM

No just a random drive-by braindump ;)

by contingencies

3/25/2026 at 10:12:46 PM

Overplowing is what created the dust storms of the Great Depression Dust Bowl era.

by regus

3/26/2026 at 11:09:16 AM

That and only raising arable crops without turning fields over to pasture and allowing cattle and sheep to graze them.

You have to do that, so the grasses and clovers can replenish the soil.

We eat because there's six inches of earth, it rains, and cows shit solid gold.

by ErroneousBosh

3/25/2026 at 11:06:38 PM

that and the removal of the native grass, which largely kept the soil in place.

by youknownothing

3/25/2026 at 9:57:24 PM

That heavy clay soil in the main photo looks awful.

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.

by CrzyLngPwd

3/26/2026 at 12:05:03 AM

Angus Calder "the people's war" about the british home front in WW2 notes older farmworkers in the south downs virtually crying as land which had been unploughed since the norman conquest was put to the plough because of grain shortages from the U boat war.

Maybe they knew a thing or two (low earthquake zone, it has to be said)

by ggm

3/26/2026 at 1:41:51 PM

Let alone the wind erosion from having exposed soil over winter.

by destitude

3/26/2026 at 11:38:13 AM

...isn't loosening the soil the entire point of plowing ? Like, congratulations, you have discovered what farmers already knew.

Also, just plowing is pointless, the point is to grew plants better, ignoring that and just looking at moisure at some level is pointless

by PunchyHamster

3/26/2026 at 12:35:32 AM

I admit farming knowledge is not my strong suit, but I thoroughly enjoyed the Amazon series Clarkson’s Farm. If you want to see a country destroy its agriculture industry, look no further than the UK. Their shortsightedness, bureaucracy, and blind acceptance of doomer environmentalists essentially bankrupted farmers in the country side.

by nodesocket

3/26/2026 at 10:52:21 AM

I wouldn’t watch Clarkson’s Farm for its educational value. It’s pure entertainment.

Harry’s Farm on YouTube is much better.

by tonyedgecombe

3/26/2026 at 11:10:23 AM

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

by ErroneousBosh

3/26/2026 at 2:27:48 AM

Zero / minimal tillage has been a thing for decades, im surprised this is news.

by worthless-trash

3/26/2026 at 6:28:39 AM

It's not. The news is the usage of fiberoptics to do the measurement, and prove the effects of tillage scientifically. The title manages to both confuse tillage with plowing, and bury the lede.

by torlok

3/26/2026 at 6:42:48 AM

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

by worthless-trash

3/25/2026 at 2:35:21 PM

I realize this exact data might be novel, but haven't we know that till-reliant farming was detrimental to soil for a long time? The no-till people are a huge part of the permaculture movement, also theres always folks talking about how important fungal networks are and how they're largely destroyed by tilling.

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.

by monkaiju

3/25/2026 at 3:58:18 PM

Agreed. This hardly seems like novel information. The method at which he arrived at it is neat though, fwiw.

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.

by R_D_Olivaw

3/25/2026 at 4:17:50 PM

If no till is better and tilling is work, why do farmers till? Why not do less work and have a better result?

by idontwantthis

3/25/2026 at 5:06:19 PM

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.

by altairprime

3/25/2026 at 11:03:47 PM

Giving a field a year off and cover crops have been done for hundreds of years by farmers who also till.

There are a lot of different combinations of variables done for both tilling and not tilling depending on many factors.

by adabyron

3/26/2026 at 12:11:27 AM

> Giving a field a year off and cover crops have been done for hundreds of years

Even the old testament talks about letting the land sit fallow for a whole year, so thousands not just hundreds of years.

by dylan604

3/25/2026 at 11:45:39 PM

Years off don't work great when coupled with high land prices and taxes.

by pixl97

3/25/2026 at 11:55:07 PM

Lots of places give property tax breaks for agricultural land, which includes fallow fields.

by toast0

3/26/2026 at 2:41:04 PM

Correct, the point is getting a $50,000 break doesn't make up that you didn't make $100,000 putting corn on it.

by pixl97

3/25/2026 at 10:02:36 PM

> 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”.

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?

by lurk2

3/25/2026 at 11:50:03 PM

What an odd response. We have centuries of evidence for minimal disturbance agriculture supporting civilizations.

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.

by arthurbrown

3/26/2026 at 12:58:34 AM

What do you mean “does not work”?

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.

by thrownthatway

3/26/2026 at 9:02:50 AM

>co2 will cook the planet, industrial agriculture is poisoning the land, over fishing will collapse fish stocks.

The insect population is down a ridiculous amount where I live and also in neighboring germany.

I could link the study and such but honestly it's not like these things aren't backed up by my own experiences and those of my parents and grandparents.

I do find a lot lot less insects than I did when i was young. We no longer get much (if any) snow let alone the kneedeep stuff. It's harder to catch certain kinds of fish. The fishing boats where I used to visit every year go quite a bit further nowadays because those fish stocks have collapsed.

by modo_mario

3/26/2026 at 6:34:10 AM

Tilling with large amounts of mined fertilisers and poisons works for now, but is not especially durable. Many of us are going to discover this given that the fertilisers aren't produced anymore since the Hormuz Strait is blocked.

by Saline9515

3/26/2026 at 2:41:25 PM

> co2 will cook the planet

It doesn't have to cook the planet to cause massive suffering. Do you think there hasn't been global warming? What amount of global warming would change your mind?

by darkarmani

3/26/2026 at 3:56:41 AM

What's the point of this? You are saying that you will not accept any new information that goes against your belief system.

The evidence is there. Read something. Watch a video. The resources are readily available and abundant.

Make a garden patch and experiment for yourself if you refuse to accept any outside information.

This video is 15 years old. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1aR5OLgcc0

by arthurbrown

3/26/2026 at 12:52:07 AM

Ideally, industrial farming will use this new data to min/max tilling intervals for higher production per acre, which is still wildly suboptimal but at least provably better than arbitrary downtime practices (or even none) that they would otherwise settle on. If nothing else, that’s language their shareholders will listen to: “use fewer resources to produce more goods” is the holy grail of corporations, and fertilizer must be the death of their opex today.

by altairprime

3/26/2026 at 4:28:16 AM

Do you have experience as a farmer? If you don’t, why should I believe that farmers who continue to till their fields know less about this issue than you do?

by lurk2

3/26/2026 at 11:53:16 AM

Because there are other factors at play. No-till is mostly about sustainability of farming. Humans often don't optimize for the most sustainable option but for the option that's most profitable (or perceived to be most profitable) _right now_.

Tilling and using crazy amounts of mineral fertilizer definitely improves yields. But it will, in the long term, also kill agriculture to a large extent if we're not careful. We're not talking about highly speculative outcomes here: The data is pretty clear and everyone with even a large pot and some soil can run the same experiment at home and come to the same conclusions.

Farmers need to survive, they need to earn money, they will obviously optimize for short-term yield. We shouldn't judge them for this, but we _should_ find ways to solve the issue, ideally together with farmers.

by NanoCoaster

3/26/2026 at 6:36:43 AM

People in a local optimums don't necessarily know about better local optimums.

by Saline9515

3/26/2026 at 11:40:25 AM

Tillage as a practice has existed for around 10,000 years. I’m supposed to believe that 10,000 years worth of people never figured out that the enormous amounts of energy they were investing into tillage was worse than just doing nothing?

by lurk2

3/26/2026 at 12:06:22 PM

Tillage before motorized agriculture was much more superficial. Besides, there are many examples of no-till traditional agriculture, or adjacent versions such as agroforestry.

The no-till experiments started when the destructive effects of deep deep plowing started to appear (e.g dust bowl). It's a clear sign that society realizes that the local optimum isn't sustainable.

No-till is actually quite technical if done right, often requires some level of herbicides or way to cover the soil.

The argument "why didn't we do it before" is moot, before the 19th century midwives didn't wash hands either, why are they even do it now? Right?

by Saline9515

3/26/2026 at 3:47:34 PM

10,000 years of feast and famine. Until the enlightenment, people were basically just guessing and sharing anecdotes.

by riskable

3/26/2026 at 4:51:22 AM

I'm not a farmer, but you are welcome to ask a no-till farmer for their experience, or do some reading. Heck, you could read the article that we're commenting on where scientists have dedicated their career to understanding this stuff.

by arthurbrown

3/26/2026 at 11:45:19 AM

Can you explain to me why a farmer with a financial stake in this argument continues to till his soil? Can you explain the benefits of tillage, or are you arguing that it has no benefits?

by lurk2

3/26/2026 at 1:46:21 PM

The modern industrial farming complex is designed to treat every field as identical, and to allow as few people as possible to work as big an area as possible. That allows for standardizing methods and optimizing the output per acre. Tilling the soil is mainly for aeration: the farm equipment rolling over the fields (which is needed to massively reduce labor costs) compact them, so you need to loosen the soil again. It's also for weeding; if you till before you plant you uproot any plants already growing there (weeding by hand is extremely labor intensive). It also allows you to mix compost and other beneficial components into your soil to further aerate it and give space for roots to grow. It's all to give your field a "blank canvas" that you apply your crops to, where you can just dump about 2-3x the recommended amount of fertilizer into it and not worry about the particular conditions of the soil itself beforehand.

by inkcapmushroom

3/26/2026 at 2:32:05 AM

We no-till farm thousands of acres in the middle of millions more acres of no-till grain farming. I don't think you have a clue what you're talking about.

by ikidd

3/26/2026 at 4:47:37 AM

> We no-till farm thousands of acres in the middle of millions more acres of no-till grain farming.

1) Does this practice work in every circumstance?

2) If so, why do farmers continue the practice of tillage?

3) Why did the practice of tillage originate in the first place?

It seems extremely unlikely that the practice was adopted and then continued to persist for no reason.

by lurk2

3/26/2026 at 12:02:35 PM

Tilling comes in many different forms. The old plow is out nearly everywhere because it is so bad. Debending on local climate and soil some places farmers do some tilling others do none. There are lots of little companies scattered around the world that make a tillage tool for that local area that wouldn't be useful elsewhere if they tried to sell it.

by bluGill

3/26/2026 at 12:57:05 AM

No, I don’t particularly care if the solution is cover crops, no tilling, a mix of both, or some other practice entirely (‘introduce groundhogs’ comes to mind as a particularly inflammatory option for mycelial networking). Advocacy for any single solution is not particularly interesting to me, so long as any practice is followed besides “dump imported nitrogen into the hopper each year until your waterways are toast”. (I am not your farmer, this is not farming advice.)

by altairprime

3/25/2026 at 9:22:24 PM

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
There's also a spectrum:

  - Full inversion tillage
  - Low/min-till
  - No-till
With a wide range of operations you can perform from one end to the other. You might end up taking a mix-and-match approach as years/fields demand it.

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

by __bb

3/26/2026 at 2:38:21 AM

This is actual reality. No-till is great until you have to till because of circumstances. Sometimes what happens needs to be dealt with; we've had years of heavy, heavy rain, and despite decades of no-till farming, it still can't absorb limitless water. That's when compaction happens, especially if you need to get crops off wet ground. So you deal with it, and start again building the soil back from tillage. You don't have to always haul out the 3-bottom plow, but even discing has a recovery period. But it's better than trying to seed into concrete.

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.

by ikidd

3/25/2026 at 9:19:37 PM

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.

by Loughla

3/25/2026 at 4:44:18 PM

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

by Zanfa

3/26/2026 at 1:24:24 PM

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.

by ErroneousBosh

3/25/2026 at 10:29:38 PM

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.

by markdown

3/25/2026 at 10:39:08 PM

The estimated area of no-till in Brazil is between 33 to 50 million hectares. It won't be hard for you to find videos of no-till corn being planted following soybean. There is also grass cover that is planted after the main crop season, that is later grazed. This cover stays till the next year and the new crop is planted without tilling. You may need to use "plantio direto" "milho safrinha" and "braquiária de cobertura" plus some translation.

by boccaff

3/25/2026 at 11:10:32 PM

I've seen those videos, and they all look terrible.

> 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.

by markdown

3/26/2026 at 2:40:23 AM

No-till feeds the world. The amount of no-till in current full-scale agriculture is by far the biggest proportion in North America and Europe.

by ikidd

3/25/2026 at 10:33:16 PM

Modern farming already uses low or no till.

by bethekidyouwant

3/25/2026 at 9:49:07 PM

After Marx’s philosophy caused a famine that led millions to die, you think he has useful agriculture knowledge to teach us?

by huijzer

3/26/2026 at 8:34:56 AM

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.

by AngryData

3/25/2026 at 10:27:48 PM

[dead]

by aaron695

3/25/2026 at 10:03:37 PM

Yes this is entirely true and we must ban farming immediately.

by trusted_brother

3/25/2026 at 10:10:26 PM

Yeah, why don't people just go to the grocery store for food instead of making a mess with farming?

by steve_adams_86