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A joint ARS-university project
shows that no-till makes soil much more stable than plowed soil in the central
Great Plains. Photo courtesy of NRCS-USDA.
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No-Till Farming Improves Soil Stability
By Don
Comis May 11, 2010
A joint Agricultural Research
Service (ARS)-multi-university study across the central Great Plains on the
effects of more than 19 years of various tillage practices shows that no-till
makes soil much more stable than plowed soil.
The study was led by
Humberto
Blanco-Canqui at Kansas State
University at Hays, Kan., and
Maysoon
Mikha at the ARS
Central
Great Plains Research Station in Akron, Colo. ARS researchers
Joe
Benjamin and
Merle
Vigil at Akron were part of the research team that studied four sites
across the Great Plains: Akron; Hays and Tribune, Kan., and the
University of Nebraska at Sidney.
No-till stores more soil carbon, which helps bind or glue soil
particles together, making the first inch of topsoil two to seven times less
vulnerable to the destructive force of raindrops than plowed soil.
The structure of these aggregates in the first inch of topsoil is the
first line of defense against soil erosion by water or wind. Understanding the
resistance of these aggregates to the erosive forces of wind and rain is
critical to evaluating soil erodibility. This is especially important in
semiarid regions such as the Great Plains, where low precipitation, high
evaporation, and yield variability can interact with intensive tillage to alter
aggregate properties and soil organic matter content.
Tillage makes soil less resistant to being broken apart by raindrops
because the clumping is disrupted and soil organic matter is lost through
oxidation when soil particles are exposed to air.
A paper on this research was published in a recent issue of the Soil Science Society of America
Journal.
ARS is the principal intramural scientific research agency in the
U.S. Department of
Agriculture.
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