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Leading independent tillage and soil husbandry specialist, Steve Townsend of The Soil First Farming Company urges everyone to get their priorities right in the first of a series of thought-provoking articles getting down-to-earth in crop production.
First Things First
We need to make more from our cropping. We need to do so with less. And we need to be at the least possible risk from the vagaries of the changing climate.
So why don’t we put nearly as much care and attention into managing our single most important resource as we do into choosing our varieties, organising our inputs and marketing our produce ?
Soil is our key asset. They’re not making any more of it these days. So we know we need to look after it. Yet too often we seem to ignore the basic biology, chemistry and physics essential to doing so.
A Straw in the Wind
Why do we incorporate straw ? Now that’s just the sort of stunningly intellectual question we expect from a front row forward, I hear you say. Hang on, humour me for a moment, will you ?
Do we incorporate crop residues because we really need to or because we’ve always done it ? Just like tillage. We like to get the ground well turned over, stirred-up and all that rough looking stubble neatly buried away.
This has certainly presented us with a challenge moving from the plough to min till. But with more efficient straw chopping and spreading, better disc and tine cultivators and a generous helping of extra horsepower, we’ve again got tidy seedbeds we can be proud of.
The key question, though, is are these seedbeds as good for our crops as they are for our pride – not to mention our reputations down the local ?
