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Episode #39: Joel’s Tips on How & Why to Use No-Till · Beyond Labels Premium

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm getting at is that there is a lot of effort right now in the non-chemical community to try to uh scale and escalate the basic non-herbicide, no-till, smother crop, you know, idea within the cropping system.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, everybody.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to another episode of Beyond Labels.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your co-host, Dr.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Cena McKella, and I'm here with Joel Salatin, everyone's favorite farmer.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, Joel.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, hi, Sena.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, today we have another listener's question for Joel.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: We recently recorded a podcast about how to start a garden.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we got a great question sent in from Sarah Skipper.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to read it to you now, and I'm going to give the mic over to Joel.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, Sarah asks, she says, Good morning.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Listening to y'all's podcast this morning, and thought I would send a question like you asked.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm confused on how to practically do no till because of all the grass growth between winter and early spring.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: I still need my shovel to help out.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: So at that point, what's the point of not tilling?
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I can more easily plant, especially when I'm talking about a larger cart, um, a larger garden.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for your time and y'all's podcast.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this is um, like so many questions, this has a lot of nuances that uh that are kind of hard to get to sometimes.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: So um, you know, like a lot of things, the the no-till the no-till uh uh interest right now in in things can easily be a pendulum that swings you know swings too far the wrong way.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so what is really the the culprit here in tilling is um is inversion of soil layers.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think if we start there, that's the important thing.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's the inversion of soil layers.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: So um so so you know you've got your top uh few inches, you know, anywhere from down to four or five, maybe six inches is aerobic, and then under six inches is anaerobic, and um, and you have all sorts of different so that's like salt, water, and fresh water that you don't want to mix.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so the the the enemy of um of of soil is especially is where you moldboard plow, where you invert those soil layers.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: So um uh you know this this notion that I can never stir, I can never, there's a difference between stirring and inverting, okay?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: When you stir uh and and you maintain the levels, uh you're okay.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: So there's there's certainly nothing wrong with um, you know, with stirring that that top bit now, uh so that that's the big picture.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so Cena, how have you how have you developed your uh beds?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Have you have you done any um disturbance or did you just start with a bunch of mulch?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't disturb the soil at all.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I did like what you and I talked about in the last podcast about gardening, starting to garden.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: I just uh start with the with the ground how it is, and I build layers onto it.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And right now my the top of it is mulch.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I would like to get into cover cropping uh, you know, in between the seasons.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I I really just do the layered, um, the layered approach.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: I don't disturb the soil at all.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I would also say though, my caveat is um I really try to conserve and build a robust microbiome in the soil.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: So my the way that I garden is largely based on what I found in the scientific literature.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I brought one study, of course, right, Joel, this wouldn't be one of our podcasts unless I cited at least one study.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um so, and I'll put this in the study notes.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: So this is just one study that I found on PubMed.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's many more like this.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um this in this study, scientists tracked the soil microbial community in comparing cover crop with no-till and tilling.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the bottom line is what they found was that the total number of microbes, uh, that diversity and number was higher when you did no-till versus standard till.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that the diversity increased with the depth in the no-till, all right?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: The depth in the soil, the no-till, but the diversity decreased depending on the depth of standard tilling.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So they're showing that you are disturbing the microbiome, that you're going to have less diversity and less total number of microbes when you are doing the standard till.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they also showed that tillage, if you didn't, if you tilled and then you didn't use a cover crop, um, you also shifted the microbial communities toward the faster growing competitors.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, you created a dysbiosis in in the soil.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my one little, you know, scientific tidbit as to why I don't touch the soil at all.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: I leave it there and I try to put layers on, which is what I think uh it's more of a way that nature would would be building the soil and growing in the soil.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, so this so this question, so so yeah, you you can go from a from a sod from your lawn, you can go directly to garden.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh one of the one of the most uh common ways is uh is to put down cardboard and then you know and then put your mulch on top of it.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I've done that.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it's called lasagna gardening, where uh but but it it does take time.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be a year, you have to be a year in advance, um and and and get it killed.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now, JM Fortier, who's a kind of guru in Quebec on uh on uh gardening, he uh uses uh tarps.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: So he he he he buys tarps and makes the tarp and cuts the tarps in exactly the same size as his bed.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And um and he does gardening on a you know on a one and a half acre scale.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: He he makes a six-figure income on one and a half acres of intensively uh done produce.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, his now I will tell you, and and here here's the thing to understand, he's probably as big a guru on no-till gardening as anybody I know, but he still has a backup BCS uh walk-behind tiller that that he uses um once in a while for for different applications.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: So the part of this question that's so critical is uh to deal with the grass that comes in between fall and spring.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so the answer to that, so you know, so then she says, well, you know, I got to get my shovel, then what's the point?
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the the point is that with the shovel or a broad fork or an instrument like that, you're actually you're actually not inverting the soil levers, uh, soil level levels, you're actually um uh just loosening that soil.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: There's a big and so you know, your your um your study there, uh Cena, uh about uh conventional tillage, uh when when I suggest some sort of a uh soil surface disturbance, you know, even with a hand tool, a trowel or whatever, or or um disturbance with a broad fork where you're you're actually not uh you're not tilling at all, you're simply loosening.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, the broad fork has been the has been the instrument.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: I I mean I have one, and and if you have well designed built soil, I mean uh you you can you can cover a lot of ground with a broad fork pretty quick.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: There's some pretty big commercial uh commercial uh uh gardeners that use nothing more than a broad fork.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: Elliot Coleman is a fan of the broad fork, and uh he has designed numerous uh what he calls surface tillage things where he actually uh duct tapes a cordless drill onto a onto a thing, and he can go through and just and just disturb about uh about two inches deep.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: See, that's that doesn't mix the the salt water and seawater.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: That that's just and what that does is get you a really, really nice uh seed bed.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: And Elliot Coleman is of course he he is absolutely the world guru on you know on on gardening, has made his living doing it for a long time.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: If you ever go visit him, um, you know, uh he's like he's he's the he's the ultimate um uh picture perfect.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, he he's invented all sorts of really specific tools um to be able to get everything uh planted perfectly.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, his his garden looks like a a CAD drawing engineer, you know, and uh it's just it's just fantastic.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: But he he does real light surface tillage like this.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so um so I think I think the key here is to always be thinking a season in advance.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um the problem with gardening is we we tend to you know we work at it during the season and then in the fall is out of sight, out of mind.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: And anyone who does uh who really is a gardening uh uh guru will tell you that the that the next spring's garden is really created by how you put the garden to bed in the fall.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now, whether that's a a cover crop that would obviously uh the cover crop would obviously smother out uh grass encroachment, or whether it's a fresh layer, you know, whatever, uh uh 10 inches of of rotted wood chips or leaves, you know.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: If when you rake your rake your yard leaves, you can put uh all those leaves on there.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um what you don't want to do is walk away from it in the fall with it kind of unmulched, unprotected, and and and just you know, and and bare bare soil.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's where you get your your weed, grass, and all that sort of thing encroachment.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um JM40, even you know, he'll actually put one of his tarps on it.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: He's got a whole roll of these tarps.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: He makes the tarps the exact side of his bed, the size of his beds, and he just it doesn't take but a minute to roll them out.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, when you if you go out in the yard and you pick up like a an old piece of board or something that was left on in the yard for a long time, you pick up that board, you know.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you ever noticed how underneath there's no sod, but there's all these earthworm castings?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in fact, there's there's if you want to go fishing, you know, just put a couple planks out in the yard, leave it for three months, and that's where you'll get you all your fishing worms, right?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you'll find these.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: And and so that's that's essentially the idea that he has with the uh with the tarps.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: So um, you know, my my answer there is a is a is a multiple answer.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: You can you can start with with uh cardboard on the ground, impervious barrier, and just start by laying a bunch of compost and and mulch on top, leave it a year.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you can start with a broad fork and and uh just loosen things and just you know just uh shake out the dirt from the sod, put the sod in your you know, in your compost pile and and uh go with it.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: The the critical thing is to not invert the soil layers.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um and Cena, you even mentioned in your study deep, uh I noted it down that the deeper you went, the the worse the microdiversity was, the deeper tillage.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm talking, I'm I'm talking about um a very uh light surface disturbance, uh like to get a nice seed bed, you know, when you're if you're gonna uh plant, and also uh a minimal disturbance, you know, even you know, uh with with say uh something like a broad fork uh or a spade where you're not inverting, you're simply uh loosening, creating uh, you know, uh creating some some some channels there where you can shake out some of the winter weeds and the grass and things like that.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that can be done.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: The main thing is the deep tillage and the inversion, the mixing of those soil layers, that's what you're trying to avoid.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, as we as we think about no-till, um uh let's not let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater, you know, let let's uh let's realize that um that that a hoe a ho and gentle disturbance um uh is is is acceptable in a prep situation.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the main reason that grass encroaches during the winter is because in the fall we're tired, we get our last harvest, we walk away from it, and we don't actually put it to bed with good with good covers on.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: Whether it's a cover crop or a cover mulch or a cover tarp, we we walk away from it in the fall and don't put a good cover on it.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, nature does not like to be naked, right?
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, when you when you take that, when you take that clothing off the soil, uh something's gonna find uh uh a place to to go in that in that because the nate nature what the soil wants to be covered, and so it's gonna do everything possible to get covered.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: So if we can put a little bit of extra effort there in the fall, putting it to bed, then you know we can minimize that spring, um, you know, that that spring desire to get to get things covered.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I love that.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Great explanation.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm wondering is if you can go into a little more detail about the about why somebody would would um switch or you know, switch from tilling to no-tilling, or why would they start with a no-till approach?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because um, you know, I think this is a little foreign to a lot of people because we're used to seeing industrial farming, right?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure everybody's you know been on a highway or a freeway and they've seen the rows and rows of crops that are grown industrially, they've seen the big plows and whatnot.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: So for some people, it is a little bit of a foreign concept.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it took me a while to get used to the fact that, like, oh, that wasn't traditional farming, but you know.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so if you could just explain why, why would somebody want to put forth that extra thought, right?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: The extra effort that putting nature to bed, you know, the winter.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: What is the benefit here?
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: And if you can also touch on, especially for a larger scale farm, how this could be a benefit given the current um skyrocketing prices in diesel.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: So uh, so yeah, we're not talking about um, so so just to so everybody understands, there is a huge effort right now and a lot of uh actual um creativity in large-scale farming, even with you know, soybeans and corn and wheat and barley, um, with no till systems.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: Traditionally, no-till meant herbicides.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: So you you know, you spray down the herbicide, you burn it down with an inner, you burn it down with a with an herbicide, and then you can uh plant into it with a with a planter that makes a little itty bitty slit, enough of a slit in there to get a seed in, and um and you go forward.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, now um there to it it's important to realize that that even with the herbicide, that has produced monumental soil changes because you don't invert the soil layers, you don't break the capillary action, all those earthworm tunnels in the soil, you don't you don't break up all those tunnels so the so the uh water rain penetrates a lot better because the tunnels are not uh severed.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: And um and and the the other thing about tillage is that it hyper-aerates the soil.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like you you've got this microbial activity, and when you actually uh when you actually deep till that uh you actually add so much oxygen that the organic matter uh burns out.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's like throwing gasoline on a fire.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: You you've got this nice, steady, you know, microbial activity, and then you suddenly inject it artificially with a bunch of super oxygen, and it's like it's like throwing gas on a fire, and so you actually burn out the organic matter.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: So there are there are a lot of you know critical reasons to reduce tillage, not the least of which is that that when you have bare soil surface, um you have tremendous erosion.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I mean that that's the main that's the main thing.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so with these, with these uh these no-till systems that really started to come in in the early early 1970s with herbicide, uh, they did show a tremendous number of of soil benefits, even with the herbicide.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh, you know, you know, so so now the the organic community has tried to go a step, okay.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: We see all these benefits from no-till.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Now can we do no-till without herbicide?
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: So there's this, you know, there's huge desire uh in in the part of many to go this approach.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and and so there have been numerous um uh tools uh called crimpers, where you plant, say, a cover crop of hairy vetch and rye.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh rye will grow up, you know, six feet tall.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: Vetch is a legume that that trell, you know, is like a bean, a pea that that trellises up the rye, and it makes this extremely, extremely dense um what's called a smother crop.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: So you have a cover crop, I uh a cover crop slash smother crop.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so instead of killing it with herbicide, you let it grow up and get pretty, you know, pretty tall, and then you run a crimper over it, which is like a um, you know, it's like it's like a big uh uh pavement roller.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine a yard roller, but with um with cleats on it, and it it actually rolls down this.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine this real heavy uh um vegetation, it rolls it down and crimps it.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't tell it, just crimps it so it gets all um uh pushed onto the soil surface, and it might make a uh you know a mulch six inches deep, and then they and then they slit and they plant corn, soybeans, barley, wheat, they they plant into that mulch, and now suddenly you have this wonderful uh smother mulch on the uh soil service.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, I was just reading several articles.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: I just uh have been uh was in Texas speaking to a conference, and and I was just reading uh articles about some of the you know the the the the chief proponents or you know the the chief innovators in this space.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: And um and one of their one of their problems is they they were talking about how to get a perfect planting, because the problem is if if you if you have a spot, let's say it's you know, whatever, 10 feet, 20 feet, that that where you don't get good germination on this, that's where that's where then when you go in and you plant your actual crop, now you know you've got all these weeds in there because you don't have the smother crop.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: So um what I'm getting at is that there is a lot of effort right now being expended in the non-chemical community to try to uh scale and escalate the basic non-herbicide, no-till, uh uh smother crop uh um you know idea within the cropping system.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: But the the reason that you the reason that you don't want to do the conventional plow disc, you know, deep tillage where you're going down uh deep is uh to not over-aerate the soil, to um to to try to keep a cover on top of it so it doesn't erode when the rain hits it, to not break the capillary action, and to not invert the soil layer layers.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of reason to to you know to do all that.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: Fortunately, on a backyard gardening scale, we have some options that the large crop farmer uh uh doesn't have, just you know, our ability to to um you know use a broad fork, to use a tarp, to to spread to very meticulously uh spread uh numerous kinds of mulch uh on on top.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we we have we have capacity to do that, and it's uh it it's it's quite amazing.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: I was just in a uh I was just on a uh uh farm this weekend in uh Texas.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: uh uh down by houston very very hot very very dry uh where they have brought in uh mountains of wood chips and um and you know that soil uh that it's it is hard um it's like it's just like concrete but over over uh 10 years by putting all these wood chips on um i can take my hand and just go down 12 inches deep in just black loamy uh it was just it was just wonderful growing beautiful beautiful uh uh vegetable crops in Austin Texas which is hot and dry so this this really um the main thing is not inverting and keeping that keeping that armor keeping some keeping a cover on the soil surface yeah i love that and we're we're about out of time but um i just wondered if you could quickly touch on the fact that you know with inflation here and um you know shortages uh in inputs for gardening you know fertilizers and whatnot there's really an opportunity here to you know to start a no-till garden or to transition to one right there's an economic incentive here um as as these costs of the inputs are increasing so as you can decrease inputs right in your gardening effort whether you're small scale or large scale it is gonna benefit you economically um like one of the benefits right is less water input which is gonna help in areas like California right where there's more droughts um but another another one of the the benefits um is is going to be that you don't have to have the input of fertilizer right when you're you doing these cover crops and it's no till can you just speak on that quickly yeah well okay so the so the way the soil uh builds you know in nature nobody comes on with a bag of uh a bag of chemical 10 10 10 in nature and applies that and and yet and yet you know that's the soil fairies right yeah the soil fairies come along sprinkle it's that's right and and and yet again i i go back to 500 years ago north america produced more more nutrition more food than it does today and so um so when we when we look at how did how does nature historically build soil it builds soil with biomass so the sun the sun grows biomass biomass then either goes through an animal for decomposition or decomposite or decomposes in situ you know on site falls over and decomposes and and that decaying organic matter is what feeds the biology in the soil which is like like the for example the azotobacter are freestanding bacteria in the soil that that if you have four percent organic matter they they they wake up and they reach out and bring and bring in a hundred pounds of nitrogen per acre which is a huge amount uh so this is not a legume this is not a rhizome uh you know this is not a nodule on the on the bottom of a of a you know a pea or a green bean or you know soybean or something that this is this is actually freestanding uh bacteria but it has to be the soil has to be four percent organic matter most crop fields in the US are not now four percent organic matter they're more like one percent or two percent they're like concrete uh and basically the chemical fertilizer goes on like a like an IV or like an IV in a in a in concrete and and so there's no soil life there's no soil biology so the whole goal here of of of uh feeding the soil a a mulch uh a constant mulch on on top uh uh whether that mulch is from a cover crop that we that we um you know uh uh take down uh or whether it's you know you know wood chips or leaves or straw or hay uh that we're that we're uh putting on it it's it's it's the decaying organic matter that actually feeds the biology in the soil so the biology all the microbes can do what they're supposed to do and that's the that's the basic goal I love that wow this is so I thought this would be a real quick episode and it would just wrap up nicely but it's so much more complex you know than one would think and every time you speak I'm like oh I want to talk about that oh let's talk about that so um I've already been mentally noting some ideas for the next the upcoming podcast so um okay we're out of time though for this one so Joel I want to thank you immensely for sharing your wealth of knowledge with us and um I want to thank um Sarah Skipper for sending in the question.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: If anybody else has other questions that they would love for Joel or I to answer please um email me your question handsoffmyfood at 1791.com.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: All right we'll see you next week