Description

This book is a much-expanded and updated edition of a previous volume, published in 1996 as No-tillage Seeding: Science and Practice. The base objective remains to describe, in lay terms, a range of international experiments designed to examine the causes of successes and failures in no-tillage. The book summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of no tillage. It highlights the pros and cons of a range of features and options, without promoting any particular product.

Topics added or covered in more detail in the second edition include:
soil carbon and how its retention or sequestration interacts with tillage and no-tillage
controlled traffic farming as an adjunct to no-tillage
comparison of the performance of generic no-tillage opener designs
the role of banding fertilizer in no-tillage
the economics of no-tillage
small-scale equipment used by poorer farmers
forage cropping by no-tillage
a method for risk assessment of different levels of machine sophistication

Co-published with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations