Disease research on no-till in the Palouse

Farm and Ranch August 5, 2009 When the farming system at the Cook Agronomy Farm near Pullman was changed from conventional to no-till ten years ago researchers expected to see a lot of disease problems when tillage stopped. USDA Agricultural Research Service plant pathologist Tim Paulitz explains why.

Paulitz: “For two reasons; one, some diseases when you stop breaking the soil up they seem to increase. And then there are a lot of diseases that over winter on the crop residue. Since we are going to keep that on the surface and preserve it, we thought that would cause a lot of problems.”

But Paulitz says that is not what researchers found.

Paulitz: “But in the end looking back over the ten years we find minor amounts of these diseases out there but none of them have really caused major disease losses, at least in terms of the soil borne pathogens. So that was a real discovery that we can make that transition and get into a stable system using good management practices like crop rotation and green bridge management that enable a farmer to get into direct seed without having those disease problems.”

Paulitz says it may be there never really was a disease problem to begin with at the Cook Farm but he points to a four-year study done by a graduate student.

Paulitz: “And he compared long-term no-tillers to their neighbors across the fence and did not see any significant differences in disease. So that kind of reinforces what we have seen out here.”

Paulitz made a presentation at the Cook Agronomy Farm Field Day earlier this summer. He says plans for the future are to try and learn more about nematodes.

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