A plow.

The No-Till Gardening Revolution: Why Farmers Are Putting Down Their Plows

Whether it’s done with a shovel, a hoe, a pick or a plow, the goal of tilling is to turn over the upper layer of the soil, bringing fresh nutrients to the surface, while burying weeds. Tilling has been the hallmark of agriculture, since its inception, with the plow being the most intensive tool to this end. But 10,000 years after we started doing it, humans are finally starting to question whether digging up the Earth is the smartest way to make her produce for us.

January 27, 2018 | Source: Return to Now | by Sara Burrows

After thousands of years of turning the soil upside-down, farmers are finally realizing they’re killing the microorganisms that keep soil alive… Faced with losing the farm, more and more are converting to the ancient “no-till” methods of permaculture

To “till” soil means to dig it up, stir it, or turn it over. Whether it’s done with a shovel, a hoe, a pick or a plow, the goal is to turn over the upper layer of the soil, bringing fresh nutrients to the surface, while burying weeds.

Tilling has been the hallmark of agriculture, since its inception, with the plow being the most intensive tool to this end.

But 10,000 years after we started doing it, humans are finally starting to question whether digging up the Earth is the smartest way to make her produce for us.

Americans first began to question the wisdom of the plow after the infamous Dust Bowl of the 1930s, in which a large chunk of our prairie lands were converted to barren wasteland after 60 years of deep plowing.

Before then, it was a common farmers’ joke to tell the story of an old Native American who, having seen a plowed field for the first time in the 1870s, said to the farmer, “Wrong side up.”

The story was intended to mock the Native American man’s intelligence. Little did the farmers know, the joke was on them. When native grasses and their deep roots were flipped upside-down, it decomposed the soil’s organic matter faster.

This created a flush of nutrients available to the first round of cultivated crops, but left the soil more and more depleted each year it was tilled.

The Green Revolution of the following decades (1940s – 1960s), allowed us to replenish the major nutrients we’d robbed from the soil with synthetic ones, putting a band-aid on the problem until now.

The trouble is fertile topsoil is far more complex than nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK), the three synthetic minerals we keep drenching the soil with. It needs all the microorganisms that help it retain and absorb those nutrients and others. Otherwise the nutrients, and the soil itself, get washed into the sea, where they destroy rivers, lakes and oceans.