Technology that doesn’t help overcome your limiting factor may not be worthy of adoption
I recently read a report that says that the total data produced in 2025 will exceed all data from all years combined over the past 5,000 years. That’s a lot of data.
But if most of it is coming from social media posts and the like, does it really matter how much data is being produced — and is it actually useful? Maybe it is distracting us from learning about something we should be paying more attention to. Perhaps, in the pursuit of efficiency and new technology, we miss the most foundational principles of soil health.
I am in favor of advancing technology, and I am a big fan of the advances that have been made in certain areas. I think that GPS guidance, for instance, has been a tremendous benefit for efficiency, input savings, safety, and prohibiting operator fatigue. I know having guidance on my farms has made a huge difference. We are better equipped to monitor the task, we do a more precise and effective job, and we aren’t worn out after long hours in the seat. I am sure there are a number of other technologies that have advanced based on the refinement of data that we could point to that are also very beneficial.
Principles over Tech
That being said, I would like to bring attention to an area where our pursuit of efficiency and speed has been detrimental to the intended outcome. Consider plowing. But before we do that, let’s consider why we would plow.
One of the most misunderstood — or at least misapplied — soil health principles is minimizing disturbance. I prefer the term “managing disturbance” — certainly there are times to disturb and times not to disturb, but if the lack of disturbance is limiting progression, then we must address this with appropriate disturbance. Nature requires disturbances for progression. How we manage those disturbances can lead us to progression or regression. Poor gas exchange, and an inability to produce enough material to mulch the soil surface, will not provide protection and habitat for the microbial community. It also decreases water holding capacity that supports those microbial communities, which are required to provide the disturbances that we need.
The soil microbes, and higher orders of species all the way up through mammals, have a role to play in mineral redistribution and increasing porosity to improve soil conditions. Weed pressure, as well as disease and insect pressure, are all affected by this mineral stratification and poor gas exchange. If these natural remedies are not functioning to support good plant performance, then we must use the brains that we have been given to intervene and provide the disturbance that is required.
Unfortunately, much of our ability to use our brains to witness and observe conditions has been supplanted by “advanced technology” that overlooks these most foundational principles of soil health progression. Our conversations have become arguments over which technology of weed control or pest suppression provides the greatest benefit, rather than considering which of the basic principles is missing.
Monocrop production and very limited rotations are also not allowing the system to perform the necessary disturbance in the way that soil was created to function. Annual crops grown in the same seasons have a very limited ability to address soil conditions that may need remediation by diverse perennial species. Maybe we could handle this differently if we included regeneration periods and grazing animals as an integral part of the long-term system, but short annual-plant seasons don’t allow for the plants and hosted communities to do the work. With all the other factors like commodity prices, insurance prices, landlord preferences or demands, subsidy payments, peer pressure and cultural pressure, it is near impossible to address the soil needs without the appropriate disturbance at the most beneficial time.
Form Matters
Now, if we have determined that tillage might be acceptable and beneficial as a tool to advance soil health, what form is appropriate? Back to the plow that I mentioned earlier. I believe that the objective has been lost in pursuit of “faster and more efficient.” At a distance, most tillage appears pretty similar and may leave the soil surface looking pretty similar, but if we look a bit closer, we can find the habitat created by our disturbance can be significantly different.
A turning plow or moldboard plow with a European-style bottom can provide a significantly different outcome in moving soil toward the goal of health. I have been looking deeper into understanding this and trying to put it into practice appropriately. The moldboards that I grew up with were centered around total inversion to whatever depth the plow was being pulled. If all surface material was not buried, the plowing was not being done properly. This desire has accelerated the technology to its present position of plowing as deep as possible, as fast as possible, and at the greatest width possible. The only limit seems to be available horsepower effectively applied to tractive force to get across acres fast. This fast inversion process does help to redistribute the stratified minerals, but it does nothing for preserving the aggregation that we are working so hard to advance.
In contrast, the European-style bottom, when adjusted and operated properly, will turn the surface material 90 degrees rather than 180 degrees and leave the aggregation layer “standing up” rather than inverted. This procedure will preserve aggregation, redistribute minerals, and open up the compaction layer through redistribution of the silt particles that hinder the gas exchange. It is becoming more widely understood that this layer of silt, deposited by water movement through the soil, may only be a few thousandths of an inch thick, but that is enough to stop gas exchange and a lot of rhizosphere expansion.
I was fascinated to see this compaction layer easily found with a penetrometer, persisting at a 3- to 5-inch depth in the fields that I work in. This was found consistently, independent of how the field was tilled in the last few months or last year or two — or if the field had not been tilled in the last dozen years. That finding across multiple fields with different tillage practices included the use of a switch moldboard plow. This layer needs to be disturbed to restore the gas exchange. If the lack of gas exchange is not addressed, the soil microbial community will continue to function poorly, requiring more “advanced technology” to address the weeds, the disease, and the insect pressure that follows.
Although tillage seemingly began in order to make crops easier to plant, establish, tend, and harvest, we must not overlook the other benefits that it also provides. The benefits of disturbances can only be recognized when we understand what is taking place. When I adopted no-till practices 25 years ago, there existed equipment and chemistry technology to address all of the aforementioned reasons why one might till to facilitate growing a crop. However, after 10 years of no-till practice, erosion improvements stood alone as a benefit. This affirmed that it does not take much surface residue or growing roots to mitigate wind erosion, but this does little to nothing to improve growing conditions or to suppress weed and disease pressure.
My point is that these technologies help move us toward some objective, but it may be the wrong objective. If healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy food, and healthy animals or people is the desired destination, then we have to consider what moves things in that direction.
While soil health principles are universal but context dependent, we still must stop or slow down to consider if we are actually accomplishing movement in the correct direction, rather than just increasing efficiency or gathering more data. Next, we have to address what the greatest limiting factor is and determine what will help us overcome that limit.
I seem to be finding more antiquated technology that actually helps overcome the limit that has been identified. Technology that helps us to accomplish greater efficiency in the wrong direction, or that is not overcoming our limiting factor, may not be worthy of our adoption.
