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UP / Thumb of Michigan | Hayinhere - 12/11/2025 09:37
Its a location thing. Im guessing your ground is over 1.5% organic matter. Ive heard some ground in michigan is so high it can catch on fire in a drought (peat). The climate and rainfall amounts combined with low drainage slows the mineralization of the soil. In arid climates the opposite is true and the plow accelerates soil OM decline and water holding capacity which is a very bad thing in those climates. Disclamer: I have 6 plows but notill everything "here".
Our farm lies on the edge of the Saginaw Valley. It was formed by Saginaw Bay. I don't know what the OM was when my ancestors came. My Dad started soil sampling and documenting benchmarks in the late 50's. I had the advantage of that somewhat sort of scientific history. Doesn't fit the narrative today of real research, but its what I had to work with. I farmed 12 soil types, but close to 80% was Tappen Londo clay loams. Those soils do not respond to tillage very well, but we kept trying anyway.
West of me, on the edge of the county, theres quite a lot of ground that was under water until much later than our farm was. Much of it is high to very high in OM. Some of the best of it is extremely good soil. If you can handle the muck anyway. Over the years, as it was cropped, either man or lightning started some of it on fire. Some burned for a lot of years. Whats left is a blue clay thats extremely hard to farm. Some are working at getting it back to being productive, but its slow and expensive to do so.
Our farm went from livestock to no livestock in 1958, other than a few hogs. Usually had 5 crops in the rotation, as well as some cover crops. The number of crops in the rotation has gotten less over the years. That changed tillage somewhat as well. When I was a kid, we either plowed or used a Graham- Hoeme chisel. I have personally worn out 2 moldboard plows and aided in the wearing out of a couple more. I'm also responsible for wearing out 2 row crop cultivators during that same period of time. There were 2 things that was very evident after all that. Our OM was declining, and our weed pressure was either changing or increasing. Especially quack grass and Canada Thistle. We were able to get the thistle patch on our home farm down to one patch. Instead of them being scattered around 160 acres we were able to get them consolidated into 1 patch about 120 acres big, with varying density. Quackgrass was really a worse problem, and I think its pretty easy to see how tillage at the wrong time can make that problem worse as well. At the same time, the OM was going from around 2.5 in the 50's to 1.5 in the mid 80's. Wasn't sustainable. Looking back, I think we identified a couple of reasons why that was, and also identified a couple fixes. We hope anyway.
In our soils anyway, if tillage was the answer, it seems like weeds would have been eradicated back in the 1800's. That wasn't the case obviously. And then, when I was attending Michigan State, part of our studies in weed control included reviewing the Beal Gardens experiment. https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2023/11/msu-plant-biologists-shed-ligh... Kind of threw some water on the notion that burying weed seed was a sustainable solution.
Anyway: I know a lot of people claim that tillage will control weeds. And maybe it does in some places. Thers a lot of ways to get that job done, dragging any iron across our place to do that is the very last way we've proven to work here. | |
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Moldboard Plowing
