With more than 1,500 responses, we have a clear winner for the two most common tillage types.
An AgWeb poll asked:
What is the primary type of tillage system you use?
- Conventional Tillage: 35%
- Vertical Tillage: 19%
- Strip Tillage: 9%
- No-Till: 37%
1572 Responses
Clearly no-till and conventional tillage are the top two choices.
Why Run Multiple Tillage Systems?
While we asked for the primary method, many farmers mix and match tillage systems based on a variety of factors, such as topsoil depth, climate, farm size, economics and soil drainage all can help push you to a certain system.
Significant time and management is required to select tillage systems and learn to operate each one, not to mention added costs. Farm Journal Field Agronomist Ken Ferrie ticks off these reasons for multiple systems:
- Manage around each soil’s weakness.
- Call audibles at the line of scrimmage when wet weather throws a monkey wrench into your plans and jeopardizes timely planting.
- Reduce cost when possible.
- Facilitate timely planting.
- Transition fields to a more profitable, more sustainable system.
- Meet the requirements of landowners (who might want no-till on highly erodible land, for example) and government (who might require you to plant covers to qualify for a farm program).
Read More:
Your Tillage Road Map
