Farming '91, 1991-03-20, Page 5FARMING ’91. WEDNESDAY. MARCH 20. 1991. AS.
Farming '91
No-till cropping
saves money,
time, machinery
BY KEITH ROULSTON
For Bruce Shillinglaw, one of the
Ontario pioneers of no-till crop
ping. a turning point in his farming
career came in 1980 when he
listened to a speaker paint a dismal
picture of the years ahead.
“1 decided we wanted to do what
we could to prepare for the low
price-cost squeeze,” he says. “No
till looked like one of the options.”
Mr. Shillinglaw had already had
experience with no-till, starting out
in Durham Region farming when
holding down a full-time job. When
/Q^utting
Costs
he and his wife Harriett and family,
moved to their Hullett Township
farm near Londesboro, however, he
couldn’t afford to take risks since
he didn’t know the conditions of the
area and had to pay for the farm so
he returned to more conventional
farming.
Since 1983 the Shillinglaws have
made a concerted effort to learn the
no-till system. It took four or five
years to gain confidence in the
system and take out the extremes.
Switching to no-till first requires
a farmer to change, then have him
change the system of farming. It
doesn’t mean simply going out and
buying special machinery. “This is
a systems approach rather than
equipment,” he says. If you make
the change everything in your way
of cropping changes. Not just the
equipment changes but the fertili
zer placement and application
changes, crop rotations become
important, weed control changes
both in the timing of application
and the selection of herbicides and
the farmer must do on-farm re
search to discover which seed
varieties work best on that farm.
The reward, however, Mr. Shil
linglaw says, is more free time for
the farmer, longer life for the
machinery and overall reduced
costs. From a strictly monetary
term, he estimates a saving of $25
to $30 an acre depending on the
crop grown. When you grow 800
acres of cash crops, that means p,
fair chunk of change.
Actually the Shillinglaws use a
zone-tilling or coulter tilling sys-
Continued on Page A6
Bruce Shillinglaw shows how corn stubble helps prevent winter erosion to fields on his Hullett
township farm.
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