Anonymous #1 16h

( after reading the quoted post I realized there’s apparently a trend about “can I ask a question” since I’ve seen that in other posts as well; this is not that, I’m curious about your perspective on no-tilling-based agricultural practices vs tilling-based)

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Anonymous #1 16h

Sure 🤷‍♂️

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Anonymous ___joker__ 16h

Tyyy! do yall mainly use tilling when you need to replant, or do you incorporate no-tilling in where possible? dont get me wrong, I know how hard it can be to transition to no-tilling given the abundance of heavy-equipment built for tilling that farms inevitably are forced to purchase, and the type of financial burden it can be to transition away from that; but I know most farms near me either primarily (or solely) till their land year over year

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Anonymous #1 16h

i wasn’t sure how that applied across the nation though, actually now that I type that out I’m gonna go look to see if there’s any studies regarding the adoption of no-tilling-based methodology vs the retention of tilling-based methodology!

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Anonymous #1 16h

So the operation I’ve been involved in is a 2000 cow dairy. We almost always till our land except for our alfalfa fields, which is where crop rotation is usually happening. So for instance, one field will be alfalfa 2-3 years maybe? And then it will be ripped up and put into corn or triticale. Some fields that were corn are then usually put into alfalfa.

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Anonymous #1 16h

There are definitely benefits to no-till, but once you factor in manure management, compaction from heavy equipment, production, existing equipment investment, and rotation needs, it gets more complicated. The fact that we move so much manure is the main offset to worsening sides of constantly tilling

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Anonymous #1 16h

I still help them out quite a bit, but I’ve never cared for farming so I went to school and got my masters. I worked for a defense contractor for about 6 months, then went and worked for Blackstone for about 2 months. Now I do a lot of remote contract work for a lobbying firm as political risk underwriter.

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Anonymous #1 15h

Like I think we moved 4-5 million gallons of cow shit in like 2-3 days last week and the week before. That all gets knifed in.

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Anonymous ___joker__ 14h

ahhh I didn’t realize it was a dairy farm!! that definitely makes a lot of sense, especially with the crop rotations since it’s the same set of crops over and over (well, with the rotation to avoid field decay (i believe that’s the term?)) while I’m in favor of no-till for reasons like the long-term degradation of top-soil, I see what you mean about the combination of various factors; and in all honesty (someone correct me if I’m wrong!) I feel as if no-till mass-agriculture methodology -

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Anonymous #1 14h

- hasn’t been developed as much as it should have for specialized farming, especially in cases like dairy farms and such. (Specifically regarding industrialized agriculture, cases like regenerative farming not so much as I feel like the two go hand in hand) also tysm for the detailed responses!! imo there is not enough of genuine and/or detailed conversation on here, and it’s refreshing when it does take place! I gotta commend you on the masters though, it takes a lot of work and you ate that.

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Anonymous ___joker__ 14h

4-5m gallons though?? In 2-3 days?!? that’s…quite a lot of shit🫢

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Anonymous #1 14h

We’re expanding to about 3000-4000 cattle in the coming year or so. Have to put in another waste containment area that will be around 12 million gallons. We usually contract guys + have our own people haul. I usually deal with the pumping/dispatching since I can do my other work while doing that.

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Anonymous #1 14h

You can move about 1.5-1.6 million gallons a day depending on field location, tanker sizes, and no problems like sheering pins on a PTO or a tanker going down. They were only doing about 1.1 million a day but I reorganized everything for them based on doing my some basic schooling knowledge I had on process improvement

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