Jim - 12/17/2009 19:31

First of all, I am an engineer not an agronomist. I am just commenting on what I see.

If plants are starved for oxygen that is a problem that needs to be dealt with. However deep tillage is not necessarily THE answer for oxygen....

The cornbelt's soils seemed to do just fine long before man ever stepped foot on it with a plow.

If you have a compaction/plow pan problem, you need to deal with it. Of course I am not talking about the natural pan of rice-type soils.

Some of our strip till customers pull a minimum disturbance ripper through at an angle to the rows every couple years. Whatever works.

Obviously truck parking areas and cart paths may need something. Headlands sometimes also.

However if you watch your traffic patterns and feed the worms on the surface you can minimize the amount of ripping that needs to be done.

I'm not sure if I follow the fence post analogy -

However, even a treated fence post obviously rots FASTER where it is contact with the soil than it does sticking up in the air. The part in the air still rots, just more slowly. I've got some old fence posts to prove that. That's consistent with the gist of the corn residue thread below - corn residue on the ground breaks down faster than corn residue in the air.

Given the needs of production agriculture, we can achieve acceptable rates of corn residue decay by getting most of the residue in contact with the soil - but NOT necessarily buried/tilled under.  Over and out on this topic -

Jim at Dawn