Basic lessons learned from field scale no-till research in the Palouse

Farm and Ranch July 22, 2009 Washington State University’s Cook Agronomy Farm near Pullman has been farmed for ten years now in a no-till farming system. At a field day this year USDA Agricultural Research soil scientist Dave Huggins reviewed what researchers have learned in the first ten years of field scale direct seeding at the farm.

Huggins: “Right off we saw that one, there was no real train wreck in terms of switching over from a conventional system to a no-till system. Our crops were successful. We planted the crop successfully. We didn‘t have really large disease problems, disease, problems, fertilizer problems or any of those king of things. We know enough about direct seeding at this point so that we can jump into a situation like that and make it work fairly well, even the first years.”

Huggins says another reason the Cook Farm was set up was to look at precision agriculture more closely. He says it just seems intuitive that precision agriculture should be brought to bear on the variations seen across the landscape of the Palouse.

Huggins: “And that’s what we are learning. If there is a poor area in the field that doesn‘t yield well, it tends not to yield well every year. And t those are kinds of information we can take advantage of from the stand point of, for instance our management of fertilizer. We don‘t need to apply a full rate in those locations. We can start to adjust those rates to better match the kinds of productivity we expect from those locations.”

Huggins says the goal is to develop decision aides for farmers for precision farming.

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report on the Northwest Ag Information Network.