With over 50 years of farming under his belt, Karl Schrade knows that growing vigorous, high-yielding crops begins with healthy, productive soils. And while it’s true that he has a wide array of agricultural products available to him that can help improve crop productivity, he strives to implement the best management practices to help increase the health of the soil on his 400 owned and rented acres of land in the middle of the Flathead Valley. For Schrade, and a handful of other farmers in the valley, the primary strategy is to practice conservation tillage.
Conservation tillage refers to a type of tillage that minimizes (“minimum-till”) or eliminates (“no-till”) soil disturbance from farm operations like harrowing or disking, leaving at least 30 percent of the soil covered by crop residues.
Schrade, who has been using a combination of minimum- and no-till approaches since 1999, first heard about the details of conservation tillage when he attended a winter Ag Expo in Spokane, Wash. There, a speaker was talking about “no-till” as a means of reducing erosion and increasing yields in non-irrigated crops.
“Most of my acres are dryland,” Schrade explains. “No-till sounded like it might work, so I came home and tried it.” He has stuck with it ever since. Schrade currently produces hard red spring wheat, barley, peas, and hay on his land, and hopes to try growing no-till canola in the future.
Schrade certainly sees the short-term advantages of conservation tillage. “Yields can be up to 20 percent higher in some crops,” he says, “and expenses are lower.”
Studies across the U.S. and Canada have shown conservation tillage to have both long- and short-term benefits. In the long-term, reduced tillage and increased residue on the soil surface minimizes soil erosion from wind and water, and can decrease compaction caused by routine, heavy tillage.
In the short term, no-till soils tend to hold more moisture since spring tillage dries out the soil. As well, crop residue left on the soil surface over the winter helps to trap snow and increases spring soil moisture. Schrade also sees another benefit of conservation tillage on some of his rocky, non-irrigated land, where practicing no-till reduces the time he has to spend picking rocks. “It’s a significant time-savings for me,” he says.
However, conservation tillage is not without its challenges. “You can’t be an early seeder,” Schrade says. Untilled soils do not warm up as quickly as tilled soils, so planting is often delayed by up to two weeks compared to conventionally tilled fields. In some years, delayed planting can have a detrimental effect on crops in a number of ways, including delayed flowering and maturity.
Another potential challenge with conservation tillage is an increased reliance on chemical weed control. Typically, tillage is used as a means of mechanical weed control in farming, but that isn’t an option in no-till systems. Depending on the crop and how the farmer chooses to manage it, there can be an increase in herbicide use in no-till systems.
Schrade, however, strives to reduce his use of herbicides and is always trying new approaches in his fields. His use of a varied crop rotation helps to “confuse” weeds by changing up the resources that are available to them, and he occasionally uses light cultivation to control weeds and manage tough crop residue (e.g., straw). He also uses a shredder to chop residue and spread it evenly on the field, creating a mulch barrier on the soil surface that helps reduce weed growth. More importantly, shredding the crop residue allows Schrade’s standard seven inch hoe drill to get through the field more easily at seeding, eliminating his need for expensive air seeding equipment.
Schrade, whose family moved to the Flathead Valley in 1928, took over the family farm as a young man in 1960. He’s seen the valley change over time, and from his perspective, some changes are better than others. His shift to conservation tillage has been a good change, he says, and he’s sure that the long-term benefits will be more measurable over time. As of now, he has been able to raise a family here, pass land down to future generations, and do his share to keep farming a part of the Flathead Valley.