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Contour plowing or lack thereof

T

Texasmark1

Well-known Member
I looked at putting this on the "Using Your Tractor" forum but this is what people read so here-tis; newest date there was a week ago.

Back in my urban grade school, I was taught and had pictures in my text book of contour plowing to preserve the top soil. My current edition of "Mechanics in Agriculture" by Lloyd Phipps also recommends it as the best practice.

Down here in the blackland we do that and also have terraces contoured around hillsides to contain the water and prevent erosion. The runoff from the terraces is routed via grassed viaducts.

I see lots and lots of really enjoyable pictures from you guys up there and most of you run straight up and down a hill with no thought to erosion apparently.

So how do you deal with it? Word down here is that your topsoil up there is 6' deep and you have plenty to spare. Down here it's measured in single digit inches. Maybe that's the answer but still erosion can wash your plantings away and all.

Just curious,
Mark
 
Just speaking for myself,some of my fields are so small,and the topography changes in such a short distance,there's just no other way than to go uphill sometimes. I didn't realize how bad that one 15 acre field was until I tried to pick the corn this year. It had frozen and was warming up and thawing,so it was slippery as all get out. There really wasn't any place that I wasn't going up,down or on a side hill. The side hills usually went two directions at once. Up or down and to the side.
As far as 6' of topsoil here. No. I'd be happy to have 6 inches of it.
 

Mark, here in Iowa, we do it the same way as you do. Everything is terraced and contoured. Only exception is flat river bottom ground. I might also mention that since the arrival of LARGE farm equipment, quite a few fields have been "remodeled". The smaller terraces taken out, and replaced with bench terraces and drainage tile.
 
How do we do it? We sold our plows for scrap iron 30+ years ago and went to 100% no till. Yields are as high (or higher) than area farms that still use conventional tillage, we save big dollars in equipment cost, fuel, etc. And our soil stays where it belongs. Soil structure is improved. Granted, it doesn't work everywhere, but it works incredibly well here.

A good friend of mine lives in southern part of North Dakota. He uses strip till with much the same results.
 
I don't have any really hilly land but I do plow up and down the grade where it exists. The USDA soil and water service rated my land HES which I took to mean as highly erodible soil, but there has been no sign of any erosion that I can see.
I do practice minimal tillage, meaning I only plow my land every 3 years or when turning grassland into cropland. Running a disk over the corn stubble a couple of times and then planting it seems to work OK.
I do like the looks of those contoured fields though.
 

For those of you have "thrown" the plow away and have gone strictly minimum till or no till, good for you, but you missed the point. Hill ground, and hill sides, even if you are no till planting, STILL need to be terraced and farmed on the contour.

For those who claim to be planting straight up and down on those hills, you are only fooling yourself, because you ARE losing top soil to erosion. If the field is too small to plant on a contour, then it needs to be seeded down to grass and left that way.
 
No-till is really the best we can do to reduce erosion. But even no-till doesn't stop erosion.

Farmers in my area stopped moldboard plowing in the early eighties. Now they use rippers that run 18-24 inches deep but will tell you they don't have much erosion.

There is a reason the Mississippi river is nicknamed the "Big Muddy".
 
Fields are pretty irregular here. I've never owned a plow. We had one when I was a kid and used it in table flat ground. That was in the days of "till it to death" though.

I won't cultivate or disk over terraces. I plant with the terraces on most fields. There is one field with terraces that I mainly plant over - it isn't until the top 10 acres that it gets steep so I plant and till with terraces there.

One of the big problems here is that some of my terraces were built where there are springs so it is never dry enough to plow there. It is dry enough to get a planter through about once every 5 years and then you have a 50/50 chance of getting the crop out you planted there.

On the steep fields around here they plow with the terraces and only the terraces. I don't know of anyone that has tiled around here but there are a good many terraces.

The highest spot in the county is on the next section over. That idiot disks and plants right up that hill. They are just hard on everything - land and equipment alike. Daddy gave him everything and will buy him more topsoil if he ruins it. Lol
 
Apparently the whole concept of crop rotation has been thrown out the window?

How is pumping chemical herbicides and chemical fertilizers into the ground to artificially promote crop yields better?
 
(quoted from post at 09:22:04 12/22/14) Apparently the whole concept of crop rotation has been thrown out the window?

How is pumping chemical herbicides and chemical fertilizers into the ground to artificially promote crop yields better?
Click to expand...

Sad as it may be, there is very little of a market around here for anything other than corn or soybeans.
 
We used 90' wide contour strips here. Some has enough hills that you almost came back in the same direction that you started at the other end. Alternating corn and alfalfa. Tried not to have two adjacent strips tilled in the same year. Oats were used as a cover crop to get the alfalfa established and the straw was needed for bedding. Sometimes there would be a field of soy beans but usually all the crop land was needed to fed the cattle.

Since the land was sold the contours are no more. We had fields of 6 to 10 acres. Just one 70 acre field now.
 
What would you want to rotate to? Corn is a grass crop,soybeans are a broadleaf. Soybeans fix nitrogen,they require a whole different class of herbicides.
Am I doing it any worse with a corn/oats/alfalfa rotation? Two grass crops then a broadleaf? What should be in the rotation,Christmas trees?
 
Depends what you consider "better"
If you want optimum yields and maximum profit then you Do what takes you there. If you want to build you soil over the long term you would have a different method.
 
Lots of difference in soil from one area to another. here we have light soil that washes bad. Any slop at all and it has to be terraced. Other places they farm hills that we could only pasture. And they get more rain than we do too. Must be a difference in soil structure.
 
It was called the Big Muddy decades before anyone was tilling the Ohio valley - let alone the Mississippi or Missouri valleys.
 
Here(Delmarva)it's flat as a pancake, most everyone no tills and the ditches still run brown every time it rains. Why? Because they farm the ditchbanks and don't leave filter or barrier strips. But they get named "conservation farmer of the year" time after time. We are starting to see gullies in the field edges now. My dad is spinning in his grave at what they are doing to the soil and the bay.
 
We get a huge amount of rain here. There are no terraces big enough to hold the water. Leaving grassed water ways and grass contour strips as sediment fences are about all you can do besides leaving it in grass.

Luckily its so rocky we don't get big gully washers, you might scour down 12" before forming a pure rock stream bed.
 
Funny ain't it? I just have to laugh. The corn/soybean guys are just taking the grain,putting all that residue back in the ground every year. I take half my corn for silage,bale some of the stalks from the corn that I pick,take the straw off from the oats and take the hay right to the stubble year after year,but because I have cows and calves on pasture and I'm out there doing all the work myself with older equipment,the tourists think I must be doing it better. At least that's what people seem to think when they stop in here wanting to buy a steer for the freezer. All a matter of perception I guess.
 
Parallel terraces, minimum tillage close to the contour and contour planting are still common practices on hilly ground. Headlands or end rows are the exception. Small fields and big equipment sometimes limits what can be done efficiently, but many guys are willing to take the hit in machinery efficiency to work on the contour. It just takes some planning and a little more time.
 
One of the reasons we don't terrace where I'm at is that we don't get the gully washer rains that folks further south do. For us an inch over a day is most common, so we don't often get washouts like others do. And for us no til just doesn't work. Most ground is chiseled here, but molboards are still used. We do use grass waterways tho where necessary.
 

It is going to be interesting to see how many of the diehard, no till only farmers maintain that same philosphy with the coming of much lower fuel prices.
 
Around here, (NE Wisconsin, along the Niagra Escarpment) the glaciers smoothed everything out so no real big hills to deal with. We still plow our corn stubble and old hay fields under most years. It works here. If you don't plow or chisel, the land won't warm up and dry out very fast in the spring. Lots of big guys have gone back to the moldboard. Just this weekend I saw 2 Magnums pulling 5-6 bottom plows in the same field.

It also takes more HP to pull a plow here. We pull 4-16's with 100 HP. 3-16's with 80. Sometimes we can do it with 70 HP.

If we go to my brother's house 40 miles away, they have lots of hills and the practices change.

Donovan from Wisconsin
 
No till farming is not only a fuel savings. I haven't bought a plow share, or sweeps, or disc blades for a few years now. I can also about do all my spring and fall planting on one 100 hour oil change.

All my Brother and I have is a 140hp tractor to pull the drill. We save several trips across the land.

I also have plow days for several of our friends that want to get out and play with their old tractors. If we get rains, then the plowed ground will normally outproduce the no till ground a little, but it's not that noticeable.
I love to see the black soil turned over, but if you haven't tried the no till method, I sure wouldn't knock it. It makes those of us who are doing it look at you a little funny.

Now this is in Central KS where the rains are not a common sight, so in other areas it may be totally different.
 
I don't knock no-til, it just doesn't work where I live. It's just to cold and wet in the spring and if you don't have dark soil to warm faster and stir it to dry it some the seeds will frequently rot before they sprout. Lots of locals have tried it and some do use it for corn on beans with success, but there have been several that have tried to go all no-til with poor or worse results. I can see the benifits for dryer and warmer climates.
 
I started no tilling back when fuel was still relatively cheap. That's not the reason why we no till, just an added benefit. The reason why we no till in the first place is the yields are higher if you do it right, the time required to put out a crop is cut by 2/3rds or more, soil structure is vastly improved over time, we can farm hilly ground with no ill effects, equipment cost is substancially lower, AND less fuel used at any price.

If someone was to give me all new tillage equipment and all the free fuel I wanted, I'd STILL no till (and sell the tillage equipment to someone who's mind is securely closed)
 
I liked going across the bridge and up the peninsula. Other than going through Norfolk and Wilmington. Hard to believe you are that close to the mess on the other side of the bay out there.
 
We terrace then just farm over them. Average rainfall for a year is about 20 inches. About every 70 years a major rain storm comes through and floods everything.
We can't use sod patches for erosion control. After a couple rains it filters out the dirt, the dirt builds up, the grass grows over it, then you have a ridge for the water to run along and wash out a ditch anyway.
 
Down here the rotation is corn, milo, and wheat not necessarily in that order. They, primarily renters, used to burn off stubble as a norm but thanks to the county commissioners you can't burn anything outdoors so guess what. The soil gets the stubble. Aw shucks. I've read about the amount of residue (plowed in) required for this and that and it surely suffered when they used to burn.

Mark
 
Thanks for the informative coments. Surely a lot of us learned something.

Interesting comments about rainfall rates. Down here most of our rain is via thunderstorm accompanying cold fronts from the NW. They come in hard and fast and can really tear things up.

Mark
 
Im in SW MN and agree, in certain areas it is the way to go. I had asked dad years ago about no till when I was growing up. He had mentioned it didn't work real well in this area. There is a farmer a few miles down the road that does a few fields that way. Havent asked how it turns out. It seems to be enough to do it again next year but not enough that other farms are doing it in the area.
 
Tom,

Do I have a funny story for you that Im sure you know all about. In the late 90s I became acquainted with the Cathman brothers. I went to there farm to try to buy an A-C front unload manure spreader. Of course Willis would not sell it but he had to show me where they had just started planting on the contour for the first time ever. Willis replied "that's just like farming on the level!". I still laugh about that today.

Jim
 
Jim, even funnier is that Willis and Herman are my great uncles and I have been running that very farm for over ten years! I am just up the hollow from there!
 

I still have places where I run uphill and downhill, but not much. there are some anomalies in the lay of the land that can't be dealt with any better. My long term goal is to correct the field layouts, but in the meantime, I have grass waterways.

I have seen lots of guys just west of me in Ohio between East Liverpool and Columbiana who have some hills that compare with mine who plow everything top to bottom and don't seem to take care of the soil. Those are the ones who I think might lead to all of us being under some legislative control someday.
 
Right Jon f. I am in s. central Mn. and it doesn't work here either. Over the years many have tried it but after 2 or 3 years they go back and hook to the tillage equip.
 
(quoted from post at 20:37:55 12/23/14) Right Jon f. I am in s. central Mn. and it doesn't work here either. Over the years many have tried it but after 2 or 3 years they go back and hook to the tillage equip.
Click to expand...


I'm west of you I think near Fergus Falls. Couple of guys tried no till here. Didn't work well.

As far as rotations on crops. We have a few guys around here who only do grain. So basically corn/bean rotations are what they do. Every now and then they may plant wheat. One guy who used to be dairy is now all grain. He sold all his forage and hay equipment a couple of years ago.

Rick
 
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