Plowmans folly

In parts of the midwest oldtimers used to plowdown covercrops such as sweet clover. Sweet clover is semi viney but if stood up the plants branches will reach 6' tall. By plowing a fully mature stand of this type of crop they built living top soil. The massive amounts of plants will rot down to maybe an inch of material but is spread throughout the top soil. This increase in organic matter would inturn increase microbial activity and populations of earthworms.

The fact is almost no one does this anymore. In my area we have a silt loam/ red tan clay mix. The pure notillers have heavy runoff and more ditches in their fields than those who do some tillage. Its not that a person should moldboard plow every field every year,(like was done years ago) but it remains a useful tool when needed.

Where it works, it saves a lot of fuel, and topsoil on hilly ground. There are some areas, such as the frozen clay soild 'here' in Minnesota that would not warm up & dry out until June - it doesn't work dependably 'here'.

The negatives of it are more weeds, cooler soil, wetter soil, compacted soil will not get worked up.

But there are no hard & fast rules. In fact _this_ year my very best field of soybeans I had the cattle grazing on the cornstalks last fall. Disked it twice the last day of May, planted it, and it was the only good field of beans I had - I was figuring it would be the bad one.

I typically have 1 or 2 fields that get treated this way, and it does work - but I would not want to do the whole farm this way in my climate & soils.

--->Paul