There are a number of factors which seem to cause the tillage pendulum to swing back and forth from plow-disk-harrow to no-till and back again over the years.

Weather (mostly last year's), crop prices (you can do a lot of driving back and forth at $7 corn), fuel prices, crop genetics (corn plants are a lot tougher than they were 20 years ago), shift to more corn on corn, average farm size (increased over the years), and geography (location-specific) factors all interact to cause shifts from one tillage extreme to the other.

This is one reason I am so enthusiastic about strip till - it combines the best of both worlds. Sort of like farming in a series of flower pots. We spend our energy, fertilizer and resources on the soil which is where the next crop will be and not under tractor tires. Corn especially has been shown to do better when it has some black soil to grow at least in many geographic/climate areas. Maybe strip till is the middle of the pendulum. You get the benefits of a black strip without turning over the whole field.

If you look at the pictures I posted of our combining strip till and deeper tillage in WC IL corn last Thursday and try to imagine where the corn will do better - in the black strip or in the hard to see slots on the left - you can see why the pendulum may swing back to the black strip in some soils. Soils are also different.

I think there is long term a trend towards more precision and less waste in many areas of life. Various evolving technologies can be used to make farming much more precise and efficient.

If as is discussed in a Marketing thread there are 70 million more people to feed every year on a planet that is not growing every year this means we MUST be more efficient just to stay where we are. There is a reason folks from the Middle East spend their oil money buying 40,000 acres of Indiana farm land, as MSB points out. We physically can not just keep doing things the same old way forever. jmho.

Charloz, you don't need to apologize for your English, I guarantee you it is a lot better than most of our French!

Jim at Dawn