[HN Gopher] Earthquake scientists reveal how overplowing weakens...
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Earthquake scientists reveal how overplowing weakens soil at
experimental farm
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec0970
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 63 points
Date : 2026-03-25 14:12 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washington.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washington.edu)
| monkaiju wrote:
| I realize this exact data might be novel, but haven't we know
| that till-reliant farming was detrimental to soil for a long
| time? The no-till people are a huge part of the permaculture
| movement, also theres always folks talking about how important
| fungal networks are and how they're largely destroyed by tilling.
|
| I mean even Karl Marx talked a ton about soil health and while he
| mostly talked about "metabolic rift" not tilling (that I know
| about) specifically it seems like a similar focus on short term
| output vs long term soil health.
|
| I guess I'm just not clear on if there is actually a new serious
| problem being "revealed" as the title says or just being
| substantiated further.
| R_D_Olivaw wrote:
| Agreed. This hardly seems like novel information. The method at
| which he arrived at it is neat though, fwiw.
|
| At the very least it adds a new vector to the position. I was
| also unaware of how receptive to disruption fiber optic cables
| were. So, at least I learned that.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| If no till is better and tilling is work, why do farmers till?
| Why not do less work and have a better result?
| Zanfa wrote:
| In short term profits vs long term benefits, we all know who
| wins.
| altairprime wrote:
| Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort: you
| just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil and then
| dump seed in it. No-till requires things like "tracking the
| soil's water retention levels", "planting cover crops or even
| giving a field a year off", and other such steps that in
| general can be summarized as "cost centers".
|
| Given the economic climate, few non-corporate farmers can
| afford that investment without the collapse of their farm,
| and few corporate farmers (none at nationwide scale, afaik)
| are willing to invest in cost centers that threaten to
| decrease, rather than increase, their rate of profit growth
| year-over-year. One could absolutely make a case that
| regulatory investment in such things be imposed upon megacorp
| farms _first_ , with their processes and technology made
| available by subsidy to smaller farms; it would be enough to
| structure the subsidy as inversely proportional to the
| acreage reaped for value, with some language ensuring that
| the cost of investment into land farmed by contract to a
| megacorp is paid to the land _operator_. To prevent certain
| abuses, they'd also have to modify farming contract law to
| make maintaining long-term use of the land an inalienable
| right, so that unsustainable output-quota farming contracts
| are unenforceable.
|
| This is an unlikely outcome in the U.S., but I still
| appreciate the researches providing more evidence in support
| of it.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort:
| you just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil
| and then dump seed in it. No-till requires things like
| "tracking the soil's water retention levels", "planting
| cover crops or even giving a field a year off", and other
| such steps that in general can be summarized as "cost
| centers".
|
| No-Till is one of those ideas like permaculture or Modern
| Monetary Theory that attracts emphatic advocates while
| going against conventional practice. It isn't clear why it
| would just be being adopted now if it actually worked. Do
| you have any actual experience farming?
| Loughla wrote:
| No till requires access to first world country technology to
| make work. No till in the United States and similar countries
| is very very very established practice. It's not less work by
| any means, it's just a different kind of work with different
| machinery.
|
| Source: was full time farmer until Grandpa died.
|
| I'm guessing less developed countries still till the soil? I
| have no idea.
| __bb wrote:
| The other replies make fair points, but tillage does still
| have it's uses.
|
| Quick examples: - Inversion tillage
| (ploughing) to bury green manure crops or bulky organic
| manure - Subsoiling (deep tillage) can help break
| underground compaction, to allow better root penetration
| - Working with soils prone to surface capping
|
| There's also a spectrum: - Full inversion
| tillage - Low/min-till - No-till
|
| With a wide range of operations you can perform from one end
| to the other. You might end up taking a mix-and-match
| approach as years/fields demand it.
|
| EDIT: This is a response to the question "why do it?" rather
| than anything in the context of the article itself.
| markdown wrote:
| Because no-till doesn't scale. It's incredible for market
| gardening to feed the rich who can pay a premium at a farmers
| market, but it's not going to feed the world.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| Modern farming already uses low or no till.
| boccaff wrote:
| The estimated area of no-till in Brazil is between 33 to 50
| million hectares. It won't be hard for you to find videos
| of no-till corn being planted following soybean. There is
| also grass cover that is planted after the main crop
| season, that is later grazed. This cover stays till the
| next year and the new crop is planted without tilling. You
| may need to use "plantio direto" "milho safrinha" and
| "braquiaria de cobertura" plus some translation.
| altairprime wrote:
| The original article is markedly better at explaining that this
| is substantiation through direct evidence of soil structure in
| live fields, as opposed to e.g. core samples or whatever.
|
| https://www.washington.edu/news/2026/03/19/earthquake-scient...
| huijzer wrote:
| After Marx's philosophy caused a famine that led millions to
| die, you think he has useful agriculture knowledge to teach us?
| altairprime wrote:
| Given the discovered ability of fiberoptics to sense water
| content, a kind of fiber fabric could be deployed to sense water
| levels across an entire field at the cubic yard level. The
| sensing controller would end up resembling an LCD addressing
| controller in reverse, with row/column/subpixel (sub-terranean-
| pixels!) breakout. Not that pixel-addressed farm fields are going
| to be efficient to work _yet_ , lacking both processes and
| tooling for soil, seed, and harvest -- but with sensing- and
| tool-assisted farming, we ought to be _more_ able to harness the
| soul that we have without destroying it with the sledgehammer-
| nail "till the whole field" approach.
| contingencies wrote:
| Precision weeding is a thing. Some do it with poison, some do
| it with picking, some do it spraying hot oil, others do it
| spraying hot water. Any way you do it, it basically removes the
| weeding argument for tilling soil... but only if the weeds are
| small. If the weeds are large (think aggressive rhizomes or
| grasses) it wont be effective.
|
| Other arguments for tilling exist: aeration, mixing-in of new
| organic content/fertilizer (not really necessary: green waste
| can just be dumped at surface level in many cases, and this is
| already becoming more common in mass-agriculture with 'cover
| crops'), furrow-creation for seed planting, etc.
|
| Fundamentally, leaving a field uncovered for any length of time
| is bad and destroys the soil more than if you'd just let it
| grow weeds or a temporary crop for awhile then culled that as
| in-place fertilizer for a next crop.
|
| A few months ago some friends of mine visited Australia from
| overseas and I took them to one of the older wineries in the
| area. The winery manages something like 10-20 major fields.
| They brought in a new viticulturalist to manage the fields and
| the first thing he did was introduce cover crops. In the
| tasting, they brought out soil cores from before and after the
| changes, which had only been in place for two years. The
| difference was tremendous. The old methods, unquestioned for
| decades, left the soil dry, poor, and largely infertile. The
| new methods restored organic matter, moisture retention, and a
| significant sub-surface biome.
| altairprime wrote:
| Noted(?). Um: did you mean to comment on the main post
| instead of my comment? I'm only talking about futuristic
| pixel-grid stuff related to the fiberoptics advancement, so
| I'm not quite sure what questions to ask here about the bulk
| of your response re: soil biome management; is there some
| connection I'm missing? Perhaps: Are there already tilling
| solutions that can do one square yard only, to whatever
| specified depth, in use at this winery?
| CrzyLngPwd wrote:
| That heavy clay soil in the main photo looks awful.
|
| I have around 45 acres of heavy clay, poor agricultural land,
| which would look very similar to that if we allowed heavy
| machinery, or even an ATV, on it when it is sodden.
| trusted_brother wrote:
| Yes this is entirely true and we must ban farming immediately.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Yeah, why don't people just go to the grocery store for food
| instead of making a mess with farming?
| regus wrote:
| Overplowing is what created the dust storms of the Great
| Depression Dust Bowl era.
| heathrow83829 wrote:
| to till or not to till, that's the question. one way to look at
| is check the yields that result from dig vs no dig. Charles
| dowding did exactly that. for seven years he had two plots, one
| where he dug and one where he didn't. in each one he added the
| same amount of compost and grew teh same crops on both sides.
|
| Overall, the nodig plot harvest 10% more. but here's where it
| gets interesting. those yields were not uniformly spread across
| the vegetable types. if you dig into the data, you'll see, some
| did quite worse with dig and some did quite better. guess which
| ones did better on dig? Potatoes, Rutabagas, carrots and parsnips
| and cabbage all did better in Dig! roughly to the tune of about
| Potatoes 21%, carrots 21%, Rutabaga 14%, Cabbage, 11%, broad
| beans 10% better. it's all published in his books. Everything
| else did better with no dig. Shallots especially did 33% better
| with no-dig, ales 21% better, onions 22% better with no dig.
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