Long-term no-till rewards NZ cropper

摘要

A New Zealand farming family is reaping the benefits of more than 20 years of no-till fanning and a philosophy based on managing the land in harmony with nature. Simon and Angela Osborne operate a mixed 260-hectare cropping and sheep farm near Leeston on the Canterbury Plains south-west of Christchurch, on NZ's South Island. They grow a range of cereal, oilseed, legume and grass seed crops, have 180ha of irrigation and run 600 sheep. Simon Osborne's father was one of the first in the region to moveinto no-till farming in 1976. "With the light cultivation equipment we had available to us at the time, it was becoming increasingly impossible to beat the soil into submission. We just could not break it down," Osborne says. "Instead of investing in more aggressive machinery, my father decided to try zero tillage. Roundup herbicide was being introduced at that stage, and that made weed control possible." By 1980, zero-till had replaced conventional cultivation on the entire farm, although it wasn't until 1992 that Osborne took the step of maintaining plant residues on the paddocks and using them as mulch.