I threw the cheapest lure I had out there.

Can anybody guess who this was when they first saw the title of this post? 😆

A man just needs to turn dirt. If you don't feel compelled to turn dirt, you might need some midol. 😉

Outback???....257??....

257

Sometimes that's all it takes....

I do believe the God said to till the ground didnt he?

You know what’s funny about you constantly calling it something like that.......... is the fact that when you get through plowing your fields up exposing all of that bare soil……and you run back and forth across it for a few weekends getting that seed bed to look nice a purty…….and you finally make that last run across it with the cultipacker and snap pics for everyone to see……You’ll then go home and hope and pray that a heavy downpour doesn’t hit the field and mess it all up in the matter of minutes……You’ll be “hoping” for it to rain just right. ...........Meanwhile I’ll have hedged my bets and won’t require any “hope” for my fields to do well.

CNC do you find you get a better stand if you throw n mow ahead of a good rain? Would you put it off till there was a sure rain coming? As I said in an earlier thread, im gona throw and mow a bunch of oats this year. Mainly to save alot of wear and tear on my epuipment. Ive done enough plpwing and disking this summer to soothe my urge. How many lb/acre oats will it take to get a good stand up?

There’s not really a black and white answer I can give you because we are all at various stages of the soil rebuilding process on various soil types. I’ve got a great stand of biomass with great topsoil and a vibrant microbial community already in place. I could broadcast seed and have it sprout without any rain at all right now due to the amount of moisture in the soil and the m. fungi connections. That’s not going to be the case though for many who aren’t as far along as I am in the process. If I were in the beginning stages I’d use cereal rye and not oats as oats has a much bigger seed that isn’t going to do as well in the earlier stages of rebuilding….

I’m stealing this from another site but this is one of the best explanations I've read thats sums a lot of this up. It was in response to someone asking if they should till or TnM……Thanks Jack!

“I would take a step back and look at the big picture. If you are on highly fertile loam soil, it can take a lot of tillage abuse and remain productive, especially with high inputs of fertilizer. You can probably abuse your soil with deep tillage for your lifetime and still do fine. The more marginal your soils are and the more toward the heavy clay or light sand ends of the spectrum, the less ability the soil has to recover from tillage abuse.

With sandy soil, infiltration is so fast that nutrients move past root level quickly and moisture retention becomes difficult. At the heavy clay end, infiltration is so slow that water and nutrients tend to wash away. In both cases, the key is building OM from the top down.

Minimizing tillage is not a 100 yard dash. It is a marathon! For example, in my heavy clay, I had to remediate before I moved to no-till methods. My clay was so compressed on old logging decks from the removal of top soil, heavy equipment, and deep tillage that weeds would not even grow. My first step was to use a subsoiler to relieve the compression. Yes, a form of tillage was the beginning of no-till for me. Next, clay tends to crust on the surface. I had to min-till for several years. That is lifting the tiller so high it barely hits the top inch. The idea is to break the crust and chew up any vegetation so it decomposes. I would then broadcast and cultipack. Cultipacking was important in my case because, beyond pressing the seed in for improved germination, the cultipacker puts an uneven surface on the soil reducing run-off and crusting and allowing time for the water to infiltrate. Eventually I could T&M.

Building OM can take a decade or more depending on your situation. One key is the selection of crops. Don't focus on what you want to plant. Focus on what the soil needs. That is a balance of Carbon and Nitrogen, grasses and legumes. You can rotate or mix, but you need both.

T&M is one technique of no-till/min-till and it needs to be applied where/when it is suitable. No-till drills, min-till & cultipack, and even frost-seeding may be needed in some cases.

Depending on your soils and conditions, T&M may work fine the first year, or be a complete failure. The key is understanding the underlying concepts and making the long-term commitment to soil health. Then sticking to the concepts and adjusting the techniques as necessary.”

I have been adjusting my technique over the last several years. I have always been one to disk thoroughly. I would make pass after pass until there was no grass left and it was as even as a flower garden. Put out seed and fertilizer then cover. Then I discovered glyphosate. I still did the same thing, but it cut down dramatically on the time spent disking.
last year I tool it a step further. I sprayed with gly. I had it very dead. Then put the seed and fertilizer down before disking. Then it only took one or sometimes two passes with the disk and I was done. They came up great and It saved me countless hours on the tractor, and save lots of money in diesel fuel and wear on equipment. I will be doing the same this year.

Thats awesome!.....Continue to test out the idea of doing less and less in the future even if just on a small test areas and see how things work out. I think you'll find that over time you can get by with a lot less than you imagined. The book I refer to a lot.... One Straw Revolution....is based on just that idea. The farmer in the book started looking at his methods from the perspective of "what do I not need" rather than continuing to add step after step to the process. Over time I think you'll whittle your planting process down to something very simplistic. I've said this in other posts but with the right timing and species composition from the summer vegetation.....one step I think you'll find it very easy to remove is spraying.

Last year I sprayed good - disked w a bush hog on back of my ATV and it did not plow great - But plots were great - had shot at 2 mature deer.
Looked up the no plow deal under QDMA The other day and those guys were preaching to cut fields - spray and Then plant before a good rain - just drive over it some after spreading seed and do before good rain - what I am doing this year. They were giving seminars on this - They Talked about how you save your top soil And get bettr top soil over time and have less erosion - etc. and some of those guys are extremely knowledgeable. Sounds like some of what you are saying CNC. Your deer wall you posted the other day - very nice deer you harvested

I guess its been over ten years ago now…..I’ve lost track of the time…..that I started a thread on the old QDMA forum called “Testing in Progress” where I took a few bags of milo and broadcast them into a field of crabgrass in an effort to recreate what I had watched dgallow doing on his thread with cattle and grain drills. It became an annual experimental thread that went from that first one to “Still Testing” .......which was a play on the Cheech and Chong movie title “Still Smoking”...... and then from the there to Testing III, IV and V. These were annual threads that went on for 100 pages and in total lasted through about 5 or 6 years worth of test and experiments up until they shut their forum down a few years ago and did away with all of it. I still have most of the pics and files on my computer from it. It was following their shutdown that suddenly folks started coming out with various versions of this type of planting method like what you see them now preaching in seminars.

Its all good…..I’m glad to see the ideas spread for the sake of things as a whole….I just don’t have much respect for them anymore....... not only for how they shut their forum down but how they let me and others do all the leg work and take the egg in the face and then years later put the info out there as if it was their own research and experimenting that produced it…..Meh…

Way back in the beginning when I wasn’t having to tend to my twins as infants…..I’d get stoned as a lab rat and spend the morning or afternoon walking around my field trying to understand the whole process of what was going on beneath my feet and around me. I’d go back to the computer and research…..reading and watching every video I could find on soil health, cover crops, plant biology/ecology etc…..then go back to the field taking what I had researched and repeat the process.. I’ve spent years testing this and that just to see what would happen and to further my understanding of things. I didn’t just pull these things out of my arse overnight like some here try to convince you of. Its funny that after everything I’ve tested and tried to understand I’ve come to the same conclusion as the Japanese farmer in the book….Humanity doesn’t really understand anything at all…..Oh boy we think we do though. Its sorta of like understanding the universe…..The more we learn and understand….the more we realize just how much we don’t understand. I believe both nature and the universe are meant to be that way by design

Cue up the peanut gallery……..

I may be stepping in it with this question. But how do I eliminate spraying without going back to lot’s of disking?

If you’ll wait until early Oct to plant (depending on your location) then most of things in the field will likely either be dead or on their way out. Most of it will likely be summer annuals that have gone through their life cycle and seeded out. The exception will be some things like bahiagrass, nutsedge, etc….If you have a lot of issues with those then you’ll likely still want to spray until you get a better handle on them. Help your field progress to better soil conditions over time and it will reduce their presence in your field. You want your summer vegetation to be mostly comprised of broadleafs/legumes with grasses making up a third or less of the total depending on your carbon needs. Its ok to have a small amount of vegetation resprout because by early Oct we’re usually only a few weeks away from the first frost. That will knock out anything that comes back and allow the plot to jump. It might not be as pretty as you'd like for a few weeks but once it frosts you'll never know the difference

That makes Sense at one of my properties. On 2-3 fields. But the property I have in the black belt has grass now that is over my head while sitting on the tractor. To keep that at bay would mean bush hogging every few weeks, defeating the whole purpose of trying to make it easier. Not trying to argue even if it sounds like it. I’m all for shortcuts.

Oh I'm not trying to keep anything at bay from a growth standpoint.... My field is over your head with vegetation right now as well. That's a good thing because it's providing you with plenty of biomass to recycle back to the soil and turn into rich topsoil. You don't have to disk it into the soil. As a matter of fact you don't want to do that. It's better to leave it on top and let it protect the soil, hold moisture, reduce soil temps, provide shelter to microbes, etc.....Just broadcast your seed into it then drag your disk over it enough to lay down the vegetation over the seed and kick the dirt up a little. The vegetation over your seed will create a greenhouse effect and the seed will germinate very similar to how it does between two paper towels in a germination test

You’re probably pretty skeptical of what I’m telling you to do and its very understandable considering the way we’ve been taught that things must be done…..It does work though…..its just looks a little different than what you’re used to.




By the end of the season though you’ll hardly be able to tell the difference. So how did all the debris disappear if it wasn’t disked in?