Those disgusting things will increase the health of your soil. Chemical fertilizers will kill your soil. That’s disgusting.
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well you have to be careful about pathogens like e.coli and stuff from medications. Milorganite is a fertilizer made from milwaukee sewage, but it has been cooked. It has a lot of the micronutrients so it is useful.
What I was trying to get across is you can improve the soil and soil health, I have looked at this a -lot-. 
What I probably didn’t stress enough is the microbes in the soil. worms, bacteria, fungi, nematodes, etc. and the ‘beneficial’ ones are typically aerobic.
You can do more with a smaller plot of land because a lot of the techniques that work don’t scale well to large scale agriculture.
Part of it is a guessing game as to what plants will do well because you need a variety of plants that aren’t necessarily well studied especially in combinations.
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good plow-bad plow…
hello sean, it depends a lot of climate factors if one can do this what you suggest or not…
i see you are innorthern us, there is i think enough humidity for the things you do… but how it would work for example in arizona- a very dry climate i have heard?
humus upbuilding needs a warm period and also in the same time humidity, otherwise the microorganisms not like to work, also the verms are lazy if the conditions are not good…
i have once a pile of twigs here and i thought after 2 or 3 years should be rotten, but nothing, they were nearly in the same conditions as i made the pile…too dry, and when rains in the winter, it is too cold…
i raised up in the north, there it is different as here in my actual place… often a half year there is no rain from spring to autumn, and watering is also a problem…
deep plowing is not good is also my sight, also going on the soil with heavy engines…also chimical fertilizers and poisons of course…
and where you will find all the stuff for composting on a bigger area ? in the garden is possible , on the field not, so there is the plow the best way for ME to manage my field,
i love the plow as tool from humanity used over centuries, and without i guess not much progress would have taken place in agriculture…
of course, with modern heavy engines the plow can be used also unwise…
but, for example in northern italy they plow deep till to the knees, now with heavy traktors, and before with a lot of oxen , training the plow…
this for reason that in this plain area the water can enter deep and a lot , and gives to the plants the needed humidity…
this is my statement for the plow, but, how said, can be also used in a unwise way…but i think erosion problems comes more from a dead soil because threated with heavy engines, chimical poison and fertilizer, booth killing verms and microorganism…
ciao girgio
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Yes. This is an ancient problem. How can we control weeds? Perhaps we can burn them, like in the Bible. I like the idea of a robot using a magnifying glass. But maybe it is more practical to use electric current to burn the roots of weeds. This robot could be powered by solar panels. I can’t find such tech, but it is so simple, I think it must exist.
Rindert
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People do not adapt to different ways of thinking very well Giorgio. The plow has been in use in Europe for about a thousand years. It has some good points but mostly bad. It was the very thing that created the Dust Bowl in 1930’s America. And yet it is still the primary agricultural tool in use today. Other than corn, I have no experience in growing grains. The homesteading people I communicate with are all Market gardeners and grow primarily vegetables with many different methods. I have no real answers about how to adapt to no till grains but others seem to have success.
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You might like to read Growing A Revolution. David R. Montgomery tells us that plowing or tillage, or ways of digging up the soil have been in use for about 20,000 years.
Rindert
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They use minimum or no-till. The chisel plow was developed in kansas, in the 60s and is considered “western traditional tillage” now. No one uses a moldboard plow west of the mississippi except in special circumstances.
Actually it is just the opposite. The water will soak in a lot faster to established no-till faster, and it follows where the roots were and worms go. Then the top layer of stubble keeps the dirt cooler and reduces evaporation losses.
I imagine you are pretty close to the same climate as the western dakota’s. They don’t get much precipitation there either. In fact, a lot of the soil improvement video’s I watch are from the university of north dakota because they are trying to conserve water.
ultra shallow tillage for organic farming is probably what you want to look it. If you are serious about conserving water and building organic matter. Which will increase the water capacity. There are literally 100s of research papers on the benefits of water capacity, as well as youtube video demonstrations for no-till. There is also tons of research papers on erosion using the ‘traditional’ tillage.
We have a concerted effort to not to use moldboard plows in the US because of erosion issues. I don’t know about Europe from what you are saying, they don’t. But some parts of europe do, because Vaderstad is selling equipment and explaining the newer techniques.
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Actually it DOES exist. They are working on the robotic parts but there was a company in the 80s that made a weed elecuter in the states, and it worked above the crops. The issue is safety, to kill a plant requires like 15k volts and quite a few amps. The europeans especially the Germans have a couple of companies working on it because they are all anti-chemicals. And robotics folks picked up on it as well. They don’t have as big of farms in europe which in a way makes it easier to use more ‘horticultural’ types of practices. If you are that interested, I can look some of that stuff back up. The moderators in the cheap electronics forum deleted the thread because someone trying to use a microwave coil to build one, and it is extremely dangerous if not done properly, and really the microwave transformer isn’t ideal.
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Interesting! Searched: electrocute weeds, and got a bunch of hits. Why didn’t I think of that term before? Current produces heat (I²R) that would kill roots. That makes sense. It never occurred to me that it would require high voltage though. Thanks Sean.
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Supposedly the high voltages disrupt the cell chemistry, and break the cell walls. But it is like 15kv and a microwave transformer only does like 2kv But the said it was working… So I don’t know. Soil moisture plays a role too. It is something that sounded fun to try but I would screw it up somehow. 
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Don’t forget Biochar. Lots of info on DOW for making charcoal.Potential effects of biochar application on mitigating the drought stress implications on wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) under various growth stages - ScienceDirect
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I don’t think we need a research paper for that. Just put your retort out with water, then see how many months it takes to dry the char…lol
But some of the vegetable farmers especially in the southwest, like arizona are buying biochar. I’m not convinced it works on all soil types equally well.
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I feel like biochar works best when the soil has a strong biome and minerals to hold. Maybe with irrigation it can work out west.
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Yes, don’t forget to inoculate biochar with urine, compost etc. Without loading it up with goodies before adding to soil, it may suck up nutrients and weaken the crop the first year.
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I cheated last spring and diluted 12-12-12 in a quarter of a 5 gallon pail and then soaked up the rest of the pail full with bio char. Somewhere I have a picture of two rows of potatoes with this concoction next to two rows without and there was a marked difference in the results.
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Here I got the free download from
They are claiming significantly reduced weeds, and i don’t see why it couldn’t be scaled down or done slowly. Some of the ultra-minimal tillage stuff, you actually need to be moving at like 10mph. I don’t think it actually has to be the chevron pattern. What the chevron does, is it continuously applies pressure to a small section at a time, but that section continuously moves. You can probably get away with stepped like 2 sets of 4-6" sections maybe slightly overlapping. It won’t be quite as good but i’m not sure how you get the v-shape over a cylinder like that, but I am not a fabricator. I am guessing since you aren’t going to be moving fast or far, you could cast it out of cement. then embed the steel protrusions or a bracket to hold them into the cement. The idea is to crimp it not cut it though. If you cut it, a lot of weeds will grow back.
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