Joseph Kelly (crimper)

Transcription

music music Well hello. Hi my name is Francisco Arriaga. I'm a soil and water management specialist with the UW Extension and also a faculty member in the Dept. of Soil Science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison Today we're at Arlington Wisconsin looking at some beautiful soils We have had the opportunity to visit the soil pit that is dug next to some plots of Dr. Joe Lauer. This trial that he has had here has been in place for over 25 years and highlights two tillage management systems the first we will talk about is a fall chisel operation followed by a disking operation in the spring. This system has been in place for over 30 years and we can see here the soil profile. The first thing to note would be the depth of the organic matter layere, the "A" horizon. I have it that highlighted with 3 little dots in here and we can tell its about 6 or 7 inches in depth so it looks pretty good. These soils are are plainfield series which are very highly productive soils in Wisconsin Over here we can we try to expose some of the roots on this corn crop to show you how they've been growing. We can see that for the most part they're going to keep growing pretty nicely We can find some roots all the way to about three feet of depth. So overall it's a pretty healthy. Upon closer inspection though ---poking around a little bit--- you start finding a layer of the soil right about that interface where tillage would would operate off and that layer is a little bit denser it's not yet a compacted the layer ---I would not call it a compacted layer but you can definitely see that they're is some densification over here. Now we'll go and talk about the no-till side to look at the soil pit which was managed under no-till for 25 years So we're in a no-till side like I said 25 years of continuous no till managed exactly the same way as the conventional tillage that we saw earlier. One thing we see is that the depth of the organic matter layers I have pointed out with this little dots it's slightly slightly deeper --- maybe about an inch or so--- so this probably comes closer to a 12-inch mark so that's one dramatic difference. The other thing is that this soil feels a lot more mellow So when people talk about a soil tilth concept this is what they're talking about. And we can see again the root system we tried to expose in here are pretty healthy too and looks a little more are developed you see a few more roots deeper in the soil profile relative to conventional tillage So why is this important? One thing that's happening with the no-till system is that since we're not incorporating mechanical tillage those aggregates in the soil surface do not get broken. Any time with new tillage you physically destroy those aggregates in the soil surface By doing that you're burning some organic matter but the other thing is that you're breaking your aggregation so you can imagine my hands being an aggregate they are gonna be close together the spacing between them that's really what we get a lot of infilration in the soils By doing tillage a lot of times we destroy that interface --those macropores that we talked about. So what's happening in a no-till system is that we get a lot more percolation of water and the soil is able to recharge a lot better for the crop of that we're growing for more information you can visit my website or you can contact your local Ag Agent