alt Hacker News> Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort: you just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil and then dump seed in it. No-till requires things like “tracking the soil’s water retention levels”, “planting cover crops or even giving a field a year off”, and other such steps that in general can be summarized as “cost centers”.
No-Till is one of those ideas like permaculture or Modern Monetary Theory that attracts emphatic advocates while going against conventional practice. It isn’t clear why it would just be being adopted now if it actually worked. Do you have any actual experience farming?
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We no-till farm thousands of acres in the middle of millions more acres of no-till grain farming. I don't think you have a clue what you're talking about.
No, I don’t particularly care if the solution is cover crops, no tilling, a mix of both, or some other practice entirely (‘introduce groundhogs’ comes to mind as a particularly inflammatory option for mycelial networking). Advocacy for any single solution is not particularly interesting to me, so long as any practice is followed besides “dump imported nitrogen into the hopper each year until your waterways are toast”. (I am not your farmer, this is not farming advice.)
What an odd response. We have centuries of evidence for minimal disturbance agriculture supporting civilizations.
What evidently does NOT work is the quite new practice of industrial tilling and fertilizer, which is causing rapid breakdown of our natural environment and future potential for food production.