Tending the Garden Farming

Tending The Garden is grateful for permission to publish this article provided by the Wildlife in North Carolina Magazine and to its editor Mr. Rodney Foushee for graciously providing the article. We also thank Mr. Carl Betsill for his insights and ability to pen and share this very important information concerning Farming's Quiet Revolution.

Article courtesy of Wildlife in North Carolina magazine, April 1998 edition, published by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.

On April 12, 1776, a group of farmers in Halifax County signed what was to become known as the Halifax Resolves and began a revolution. There must be something special about Halifax farmers. They may just be a breed of advanced thinkers, or perhaps it is something in Nagazine Springs water. Who knows?

One thing is for sure: They are at it again. They’re starting another revolution, but this time, instead of a political revolution, it is a conservation revolution. Halifax County farmers are developing a land ethic unequaled in any other part of the state, one that has great potential to improve farm profits, aid soil conservation, save time and labor, reduce dependency on expensive machinery, and, equally important, help restore habitat for early-successional wildlife species, including rabbits and quail.

Perhaps this revolution may not seem as important as the American Revolution, but to a world of expanding populations fighting to feed itself, it might well turn out to be. What the farmers of Halifax have done is quit plowing. Not since John Deere invented the moldboard plow in 1835 has metal not turned some of their soils in this northeastern North Carolina county. Now it seems that over half the farms you pass are untilled, and the number of untilled farms is growing annually.

These changes have not come easy. Just pretend for a minute that you are a farmer and your family has been tilling the land since 1835. Perhaps you graduated with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from N.C. State University, where everything you were taught was based on farming practices that involved tilling the soil. Fertilizer rates, pesticide amounts, crop yields were all based on a system of conventional tillage using a plow. You are probably in debt up to your ears for that new $120,000 tractor and can’t afford to experiment with new ideas. The safe thing is to stick to what has worked for the last 150 years. Even the old professors at your alma mater may think you are crazy to consider quitting the conventional way.

Well, Halifax farmers didn’t stick to the safe way in 1776, and their courage is still alive today. These farmers are practicing a new form of agriculture, and just as they were rewarded for their courage in the American Revolution, they are being rewarded today.

While bottom plows and high-dollar eight-wheel tractors with 24-row gang discs sit idle, slowly being overtaken by vines, crop yields in Halifax County are increasing. Fields that once produced 2,000 pounds of peanuts per acre are now producing 4,000. Fields that once produced 300 to 400 pounds of cotton per acre are now yielding 600 to 700 pounds per acre.

Farmers who might well have gone broke trying to farm hillsides of clay and rock are still in business. Fields that once showed the “red scald” characteristic of topsoil erosion are now turning brown and showing an increase in organic matter. Hilltops that once failed to produce or turned out poor, stunted crops are now as green as the rest of the fields. Hills with 10- to 12-percent slope no longer have to be taken out of production to prevent gully erosion. Instead of watching their fields decline in productivity each year, Halifax farmers are looking at fields that are increasing their productivity.

Wayne Short, with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, describes what has happened in the county by explaining that agricultural producers have quit being “miners” and are now being farmers. In the past, every time a crop was produced, a little something was taken away from the soil. Every season, a little more topsoil was lost. As a result, more fertilizer was needed the next year. The soil, once a living, breathing, complex ecosystem, was dying. Agricultural producers could “mine” the land only so long before it gave out.

With the revolution in not tilling the land, agricultural producers are now true farmers and builders of the land. Their practices are building the soil, keeping it in place. As a result, beneficial microorganisms, insects and earthworms are returning. This not only helps the soil and the crops but also benefits wildlife by encouraging the basic food chain that quail, rabbits and many songbirds depend on. With no-till farming, the remaining crop residues and field edges provide nesting habitat for a variety of birds, including quail, and serve as cover for many small species. Conventional stripped-down fields, on the other hand, provide little if any habitat for wildlife.

Studies across the country are proving that no-till systems designed to conserve soil also benefit wildlife. In one study in western Tennessee, researchers found more bobwhite quail nests in no-till fields than in similar ones under conventional tillage. Another study showed that invertebrate, bird and small-mammal populations were all much higher and more diverse in cornfields using no-till rather than conventional methods. And a recent North Carolina study found that bobwhite quail chicks were able to meet their daily food requirements in no-till soybean fields in less than five hours per day.

Besides creating food and cover for birds and small mammals, no-till practices produce buffers that prevent sedimentation and other pollutants from reaching our streams and rivers. With soil erosion accounting for more than 40 percent of water pollution in our waterways, the benefit of cleaner lakes and streams that no-till farming offers for fish and other aquatic species is immense. And the potential of no-till for increasing small-game populations shouldn’t be underestimated. Not since the small-farm era of the 1920s has there been an opportunity to create wildlife habitat on farms on such a vast scale. And it will likely take such a large effort to help some of our small-game species rebound.

Earlier I mentioned a land ethic. When you talk to Halifax County farmers, you realize that they have developed a strong sense of pride in what they are doing. These days, you are not considered a good farmer in Halifax County if you let your farm erode, if your hilltops are scalded or if your soil doesn’t have earthworms.

One of these ethical farmers is Hubert Morris. Last summer, Wayne Short, Wildlife in North Carolina photographer Ken Taylor and I took a trip around Halifax County. As we pulled up to Hubert’s farm, we saw him in the field chopping cotton with a hoe. Wayne shouted, “What’s wrong, Hubert, couldn’t resist a little tilling?” Morris explained that he had tried a new herbicide on the first four rows and it hadn’t worked very well. The cheaper alternative hadn’t worked out. Morris expounded on the merits of no-till. He even bragged about the number of earthworms in the field! He is so fond of earthworms that anytime he digs one up in his yard, he runs down and puts it in his cotton field.

As we left, Wayne explained that if you had told him five years ago that farmers would be discussing the merits of earthworms, he would have laughed you out of his office.

No-till farming doesn’t mean that you don’t till the soil at all. You must cut a small slot in the soil to plant your crop, but you leave most of the soil undisturbed. The secret to no-till is that earthworms are naturally “turning the soil over,” instead of your 200-horsepower tractor. They leave castings to serve as fertilizer and holes for aeration and water absorption. And the crop’s residues serve as a natural mulch, keeping the soil moist and providing organic matter for the earthworms to work into the soil.

It is absolutely amazing to see them work, Wayne explained. “At the first of the season, the ground is completely covered with litter from the last crop. By the end of the growing season, almost all of the litter has been consumed by soil invertebrates.”

Wayne went on to explain that no-till started in Halifax County as a legal way, under new federal legislation, to farm highly erodible land. On steep slopes and certain soil types, conventional tillage systems simply would not hold the soil in place. No-till systems were used as a last resort, instead of putting in expensive terracing and taking parts of the field completely out of production with grassed waterways. A few observant farmers began to notice their yields increasing and their soils changing in these highly erodible fields. It didn’t happen the first year, but each year that they spared the plow, their yields improved.

A few of these farmers began to feel that revolutionary spirit. What if they used this method on their better soils? This is where it takes courage. Some were courageous enough to make the step all in one year. Others tried one crop at a time. Wayne explains it this way: “Ten years ago, 85 percent of the agricultural producers in this county were miners; today, 85 percent are farmers.”

Soybeans were the first crop to go the way of no-till. Beans are usually planted in standing wheat or rye. The fields are not pretty at first—just a faint line of green plants coming up under the golden brown wheat stalks. Farmers in the area quickly termed the technique “farming ugly.” Weeds usually invade between the rows before the first herbicide treatment. The mere appearance of these “ugly” fields was more than some farmers could handle. The farm ethic they were brought up with meant that a field like this was managed by a lazy farmer. The yields on these no-till fields were the only thing that overcame this old ethic and replaced it with a new one—in which “farming ugly” is a good thing.

At first, farmers hid their no-till beans in the back fields so their neighbors wouldn’t laugh at them when they failed. As the no-till pioneers gained confidence, that quickly changed. Experiments then proved no-till would work with other crops, including corn, cotton, sorghum and peanuts. It is now common to see any of these crops being no-tilled in Halifax County. In fact, in my drive around the county, I think it was actually more common to see these crops in no-till than not.

“The last crop to go to no-till is tobacco,” Wayne explained. “It really takes courage to risk a $3,000- to $4,000-per-acre investment.” But that is what we saw when we pulled into a field path: conventional-till tobacco on one side of the road and no-till tobacco on the other. “It really takes a lot of self-confidence to do this,” Wayne said. As farmers in Halifax gain more confidence, there is no doubt tobacco in a no-till system will soon become as common as soybeans grown that way.

On our ride back to the NRCS office, I asked Wayne about the trade-offs. This sounds too good to be true. “What about the increased use of chemicals needed to grow crops without tillage?” I asked. “A myth,” replied Wayne. He explained that the same herbicides and pesticides are used in both systems. One additional “kill-down” spraying is done prior to the initial planting. After that, everything is the same. In some cases, as beneficial insect populations build up in no-till fields, the application of pesticides decreases. Also, there is less leaching of nitrogen from the soil. Excess nitrogen actually binds to the increased organic matter instead of leaching into the groundwater.

The only down side honestly seems to be the learning curve. No-till farming is different. The risks are different. The pests are different. The equipment is different. The training is by word of mouth. There are few Agricultural Extension Service agents out there with enough confidence to really push no-till in many situations. Equipment dealers and fertilizer dealers are not overly fond of no-till. The system requires smaller tractors, less fertilizer and less equipment. This has a big impact on agribusiness in general. More money in the farmer’s pocket means less money to many of these middlemen. A shake-up of an economic system always means a difficult row to hoe (no pun intended).

What does all this mean for wildlife? If you have been reading anything about small game over the past year, you probably understand. We have been saying that our approach to small-game management has to involve change on a large, landscape scale. That is exactly what we are talking about with no-till farming. It is a landscape-scale change being promoted not by a wildlife conservation agency but by economics. Just as wildlife benefited as a by-product of the small-farm era of the 1920s, wildlife will benefit from no-till in the future.

All upland wildlife studies to date have shown nothing but beneficial results when no-till crop production systems were compared with conventional tillage. Fish populations and wetland species benefit from cleaner waterways and streams. And humans also benefit directly from cleaner streams and cleaner ground water.

As a conservationist and a realist, I do not often get to talk about environmental good news. This is the exception. We are seeing a revolution in agriculture that can’t be stopped. It is driven by economics that for once is on our side. It‘s the classic win-win situation. The farmer wins, the wildlife wins, the environment wins and the citizens of North Carolina win.

Am I too optimistic? Give me a break. It is the first time in my 20-year career that I haven’t been preaching doom and gloom. Long live “Farming Ugly”!

--A Georgia native, Carl Betsill is a wildlife biologist with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.

What Farmers Are Saying

“I have found no-till to be as good or better than any conventional tillage method. My highest-yielding field last season was grown in no-till. It helps us to establish field borders for quail and rabbits without tearing them up each spring with a plow. No-till gives wildlife more food and cover year-round instead of leaving the ground bare.”

– John Branham, Halifax

“There is no comparison between no-till and conventional tillage. Besides making the soil more productive, we

are creating the food chain and habitat on the ground that both plants and wildlife need. Everything starts at

the small level.”

– David Iles, Littleton

“It’s your choice, whether you take

it all or leave some of the soil. The same goes for wildlife. I, myself, would rather leave the land in a better shape than it was when I started farming.”

– Tom Harris, Littleton

Give Ugly Farming a Try

What started as a method to farm marginal, steep land, is proving to be an excellent way to conserve rich topsoil, prevent erosion, reduce farm costs, protect streams and, best of all, help wildlife on all farms.

In North Carolina, no-till farming is most widely used with soybeans, but other crops, including peanuts, corn, cotton and even tobacco, are being grown with no-till techniques. Overall, more than 18 percent of all crops produced in the state are grown using no-till, and that number is expected to continue to rise as more farms convert to the practice.

As a bonus to farmers, there are two cost-share programs available to assist them in setting up and maintaining no-till fields:

•The North Carolina Agricultural Cost-Share Program provides funds to farmers who improve water quality by implementing the best-management practices. These practices, including no-till farming, reduce the amounts of sedimentation, fertilizers, pesticides and animal waste that enter streams and rivers.

•The Environmental Quality Incentive Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, is a cost-share program to help farmers implement the best-management practices to protect water quality.

Both programs require the establishment of long-term conservation plans on prospective farms. For more information about no-till farming and the related cost-share programs, contact your local soil and water conservation district office.

--A Georgia native, Carl Betsill is a wildlife biologist with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.

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