Long Term no-till maintenance

[bigboreblr]

Any long term maintenance, beside crop rotations. Liming every couple of years? Weed issues? disease? This can be general advice, or experience to your particular plots.

So, I am starting the no-till method up north. Started off in 2021 with spring oats, clover, and turnips. Did a clethodim spray summer 2021. Plots are pretty filled up with golden rod. Going to seed, spray, and them mow and cultipack next month. I'm in zone 3a. will put mostly rye, some oats, and clovers in. Might do tillage raddish in one spot.

some spots are very sandy with low CEC, so I might have to lime every other year possibly. I planted my largest plot from a log landing starting to weed out good with blueberries in it. Lime spread blew a tire, so I had to use a shovel to get the lime. Think adding lime during the fall rye / clover seeding will hurt? I am new to using pulverized lime, usually went pelletized because its easier to spread. I have a nice 3ft gandy drop spreader now, with a tire tube now.......... This area was a bit dangerous to blindly drive an ATV in, so I did not spray before my inital planting. Carefully ran the DR walk behind in there, scratched lightly with a spring harrow after lime and seed. Put buckwheat, rye, a bit of oats, clovers, tillage raddish and canola in there june 20th.

This year I have the gandy spreader, a 400lb lawn roller, and a 4ft old big 16 inch wheel cultipacker to tow with the ATV now. My homebrew no-till tow behind ATV seeder will be my winter project. aqn old john deere fluted roll small seed box and a drop spreader for larger seed., spiked roller and 1 row disc. Much like the firminator.

 

[yoderjac]

Keeping a good pH is important to nutrient uptake for plants. Different plants have different pH levels for different nutrients, but generally a mid-level pH is a good target. How frequently you lime will depend on your soil. Lime moves through sand very quickly. I've seen some guys with very sandy soil have to lime every time they plant. My heavy clay soil has a low pH and I need 3-4 tons per acre for initial amendment applied over two applications. However, after that, it can be quite a few years before I need to add lime. I typically wait until I need to add 1 ton/ac (for efficiency) to add maintenance lime. The most important thing is not to get anxious for quick results and till in the lime. Simply top-dress it and let nature take its course.

My weed issues were self-inflicted to a large part. Many weeds are beneficial, but when a single toxic weed dominates, it is telling you something. In my case, a pine thinning and controlled burn in our pines release Marestail from the seed bed. Once that marestial went to seed in the pines, it got into our food plots quickly. Marestail is naturally resistant to glyphosate and, at the time, we were planting soybeans for the summer stress period. Because of our deer numbers and summer weed competition, we were planting RR forage beans and using glyphosate for the burn down and post-emergent weed control. That ended up favoring marestail over most of our beneficial weeds and it quickly became problematic dominating the field. By changing up herbicides and crop selection for summer, it is pretty much under control now, but it took several years. I now view weeds in general as a good thing. I use herbicides when needed but I'm much more selective of using them and I don't rely on a single herbicide. I rotate herbicides as well as using other mechanisms for managing weeds. One example is marestail. regular mowing of clover fields does no good for controlling marestail. It just adapts and goes to seed below mower height. On the other hand, if I don't mow all summer, marestail is competing with other beneficial weeds as well as clover in the field. Then in late summer/early fall, just before it goes to seed, I mow it. There is not enough time left in the growing season to go to seed again. Marestail can still come up from the root system next year, so timely mowing alone does not eliminate it, but it does help control it.

It is almost hard to talk about "maintenance" of no-till. I see it more as an on-going process that never ends in terms of keeping soil health as a primary focus for decision making. It is tempting to focus on deer and deer needs. After all, we are managing for deer or trying to improve hunting. But, the bottom line is that deer are the dirt they live on. You can using traditional tillage and high input farming techniques to produce short-term deer food. The extreme version would be simply to put out feeders. It provides short-term benefit to deer as long as you keep doing it. From a deer management perspective (versus a commercial farming perspective) no-till is a part of an even broader approach to manage deer for the long-term. We don't harvest so we don't extract nutrients every year like a farmer. We cycle nutrients from the soil through plants to deer and then back to the soil through droppings. Focusing on soil health ends up providing the most long-term benefit to deer that can last long after we stop.

Thanks,

Jack

 

[Foggy47]

Any long term maintenance, beside crop rotations. Liming every couple of years? Weed issues? disease? This can be general advice, or experience to your particular plots.

So, I am starting the no-till method up north. Started off in 2021 with spring oats, clover, and turnips. Did a clethodim spray summer 2021. Plots are pretty filled up with golden rod. Going to seed, spray, and them mow and cultipack next month. I'm in zone 3a. will put mostly rye, some oats, and clovers in. Might do tillage raddish in one spot.

some spots are very sandy with low CEC, so I might have to lime every other year possibly. I planted my largest plot from a log landing starting to weed out good with blueberries in it. Lime spread blew a tire, so I had to use a shovel to get the lime. Think adding lime during the fall rye / clover seeding will hurt? I am new to using pulverized lime, usually went pelletized because its easier to spread. I have a nice 3ft gandy drop spreader now, with a tire tube now.......... This area was a bit dangerous to blindly drive an ATV in, so I did not spray before my inital planting. Carefully ran the DR walk behind in there, scratched lightly with a spring harrow after lime and seed. Put buckwheat, rye, a bit of oats, clovers, tillage raddish and canola in there june 20th.

This year I have the gandy spreader, a 400lb lawn roller, and a 4ft old big 16 inch wheel cultipacker to tow with the ATV now. My homebrew no-till tow behind ATV seeder will be my winter project. aqn old john deere fluted roll small seed box and a drop spreader for larger seed., spiked roller and 1 row disc. Much like the firminator.

Like you I am in Zone 3 and trying to remain no-till. I do have some new ground that I may disk to incorporate an application of lime. Most of my other ground will stay no-till and just get top dressing via my 6' wide EZ Flow spreader. I can get 24 tons delivered for about $500 and plan to spread about 2500 lbs / acre on about 8 acres of land with good clover and rye on it......and perhaps 4000 lbs on another 2 acres said previously (new ground). Any excess lime could go on some trails and plot extensions. I do have concerns about top dressing lime and it's effectiveness done that way.....but I feel over time it will work through my sandy loam soils. I do not plan to till any of my existing plots....and will hope that normal weather and rainfall washes lime though my soils over time......and allows the plant roots to "recycle" the lime for me.

About eight and ten years ago.....I applied over 30 tons of lime and incorporated via a disk and tiller. That land remains productive through this point in time. I'm hoping that by keeping "roots in the ground" I can get along without much more for further soil amendments in the years to come.