PRINT Year 2006 is breakthrough for organic no-till corn yield; tops standard organic for first time at Rodale Institute

Dr. Paul's Research Perspectives
Year 2006 is breakthrough for organic no-till corn yield; tops standard organic for first time at Rodale Institute
Roller system creates moisture-saving mulch from cover crop to suppress weeds and build soil as it slashes fuel and labor inputs.

By Paul Hepperly, PhD; Rita Seidel, project leader; Jeff Moyer, farm manager

editors' NOTE:

As New Farm Research and Training Manager at The Rodale Institute®, Dr. Paul Hepperly has been a regular contributor to NewFarm.org for some time, providing research updates, op-ed pieces, and white papers on topics like carbon sequestration in organic farming systems.

None of those venues do full justice to the range of Paul's experience, however. Paul grew up on a family farm in Illinois and holds a Ph.D. in plant pathology, an M.S. in agronomy and a B.S. in psychology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He has worked for the USDA Agricultural Research Service, in academia, and for a number of private seed companies, including Asgrow, Pioneer, and DeKalb. He has overseen research in Hawaii, Iowa, Puerto Rico, and Chile, and investigated such diverse crops as soybeans, corn, sorghum, sunflowers, ginger, and papaya. He has witnessed the move toward biotech among the traditional plant breeding community and the move toward organics among new wave of upcoming young farmers. Before coming to the Rodale Institute Paul worked with hill farmers in India to help them overcome problems with ginger root rot in collaboration with Winrock International.

Now we've decided to give Paul his own column, in which he can report on agricultural research from around the world and reflect on its relevance to The Rodale Institute's research program and to the progress of sustainable agriculture more generally in light of his own broad perspective. Enjoy.

How to contact Paul

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611 Siegfriedale Rd.
Kutztown, PA 19530
610-683-1420

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Posted January 12, 2007: Harvest records show last season’s cost-slashing, soil-building, no-till organic corn yields topped comparable tilled organic and tilled non-organic fields here at The Rodale Institute.

Using an improved design of its no-till roller—and only a legume cover-crop for fertility and weed management—the Institute’s no-till organic corn plots produced 160 bushels per acre (bu/a), compared to 143 bu/a for tilled organic plots.

This means the one-pass, roll/plant no-till system—with no additional field passes until harvest—out-yielded normally tilled and cultivated organic plots that experienced eight or nine field passes (plowing, disking, cultipacking, planting, two rotary hoe passes and two to three cultivator passes). Yield on comparable chisel-tilled non-organic (conventional) plots was 113 bu/a.

Figure 1: Corn yield comparisons, organic
plow till, organic no-till and conventional
chisel till, at The Rodale Institute 2006.

For full details of the system’s development here—and how it’s spurring innovation with collaborators across the country— check out our No-till Plus section.

For the past 15 years, TRI farm manager Jeff Moyer has been working with Dave Wilson (resident agronomist) researchers and operations staff to actively problem-solve and develop no-till and reduced-tillage applications that work in our organic production systems. We continue to improve these systems year by year. The 2006 results verified the benefits of improvements made in the no-till system in seed placement and weed management, giving us no-till yield superior to our normal organic system for the first time.

The organic no-till figures show the competitive nature of established organic grain crops—after the required organic transition period and using well-selected crop rotations—compared with non-organic production systems.

One of the myths about organic agriculture is the common claim that organic yields cannot equal those of conventional agriculture. For the past 26 years we have been growing corn and soybeans in replicated, randomized large plots under organic and conventional farming systems. Over the long haul, among well-managed organic and conventional systems in our trial, we have seen that crop yields between these systems are not statistically different.

This key result was reviewed by panels of scientific peers and published in the highly regarded international scientific journal Bioscience (Pimentel et al. 2005).

This year’s excellent results with the “holy grail” of organic cropping—organic no-till—show further potential to improve yield using the innovative low-input crop system where applicable.

Support needed to improve sustainable systems

The long-term documentation from our farm’s unique living laboratory provides results giving us the scientific platform for testing the limits of organic production strategies.

It’s true that, in the short-term, organic transition can represent a real management challenge to create healthy, living soil using a suitable cropping system. The transition also requires new marketing efforts to capitalize on new crops and crop attributes.

Despite these challenges, our studies show that, over the long run, well-executed and entrepreneurial organic agriculture can be completely competitive with conventional methods for yield and represents real opportunities for conventional, sustainable and organic farmers alike.

Conventional agro-industrial food production has received virtually all food and agricultural research support over many decades. With a jump up to an allocated $3 million per year for the current Farm Bill, organic research still receives less 1 percent of the pie. We believe that with additional research funding and attention, organic agriculture will surpass the productivity of high-input agriculture.

Research, demonstration and field production at The Rodale Institute are yielding important activities to improve our agriculture and food systems. Imagine the potential of a more broadly supported initiative.