The Rural Voice, 1992-08, Page 24No -tilling it for $$$
Best reason to switch to no -till is
greater profits, Bruce farmer says
By Keith Roulston
ith hilly land and soil so
sandy you can see it blow
off exposed knolls in
winter, Jim Gowland admits that soil
conservation was in his thinking
when he switched to conservation
tillage in the 1980s. Still, he says, the
main reason for his switch was profit.
The savings in labour and time,
fuel and machinery costs were the
solution to the cost -price squeeze on
Gowland's farm northwest of
Tceswatcr; the one way a young
farmer could see expanding his
business without a huge investment.
Gowland had bought his farm as a
19 -year-old, straight out of high
school after working on his father's
farm. He raised hogs for five years
but admits he wasn't a livestock -
oriented person. In addition, he
realized that to expand his livestock
operation he was looking to a large
cash outlay. He liked cash -cropping
and he could see it as a way he could
expand without a Targe outlay in
costs. No -till was a way he could
expand acreage without increasing
his investment in equipment and fuel
costs.
He has expanded his cropping
operation from 250 acres in 1983 to
800 acres today while keeping input
costs under control. These days, he
says, you have to do more and more
to make the same money youused to
make with less work. From 1983 to
1989 he doubled the crop acreage
without increasing the yearly use of
fuel.
He started experimenting with
minimum tillage in 1982 doing
cultivation of cereal stubble using
rented equipment but he wasn't
happy with minimum tillage. Most of
the time he wasn't able to till until the
spring because he never had the right
conditions in the
fall. The deep
tilling that was
needed to
incorporate
the trash
seemed to
loosen the soil too much, leaving the
soil fluffy so there wasn't enough
soil -to -seed contact. He had problems
with uneven germination and too
many weed escapes.
He first tried no -till in 1985 when
he had wheat seeded from the air into
soy beans. In 1987 and 1988 he
sowed beans into beans and wheat
into beans, always using equipment
he already had and modifying it, or
renting equipment as needed. He used
his own conventional drill for
planting wheat into soys.
The key, he says, is to start small
and start with something easy
and branch out from there.
Soybeans into soybeans or corn into
soybeans are easy because of the low
amount of trash. He has slowly
worked his way up to planting corn
into corn on a larger scale. Last year
he experimented with five acres and
Jim Gowland switched to no -till in
1980s and now saves soil and money.
20 THE RURAL VOICE