Farmer Writes: the plough is falling out of favour

The poor old plough is getting a lot of stick recently, and indeed sometimes in this column – but the plough is a survivor.

It’s been around for thousands of years, ever since an entrepreneurial Neolithic man tied one end of a rope around his missus and the other to a branch which he held in the ground and told her to pull hard.

Granted the work was rough, looking more like today’s min-till, but that’s how it began.

Over the millennia the plough became more sophisticated, with wooden mouldboards and the hardy female prime movers were replaced with more reliable oxen.

Fast forward to 1837 and an American blacksmith by the name of John Deere (I’m sure I’ve heard that name before) invented the steel mouldboard, and thus the plough as we know it was born.

The plough is arguably one of man’s earliest inventions and predates the wheel.

As a form of weed control allied to the creation of a perfect seedbed it is unrivalled, even today. No other form of crop establishment can do this as well. However, the plough is falling out of favour in today’s oh-so-green-world, principally for two reasons.

Ploughing releases soil carbon and it requires a lot of diesel. It’s also a slow and expensive way to establish crops. Certainly, the greens and possibly some regenerative farmers would like us to ditch our ploughs and sow directly into the soil.

And some farmers here and countless worldwide do exactly that. You can now buy seed drills almost capable of sowing into the north runway in Dublin Airport. Michael O’Leary wouldn’t be long about telling you to clear off, but that’s how tight your soils may become, if you get it wrong.

Conversely, the plough is very forgiving – and used properly will correct soil compaction.

It’s difficult to make a hames of sowing wheat in a ploughed field – whereas it’s easy to get it wrong with direct drilling and indeed min-till.

All of which was on my mind recently. Yes, it has been a great autumn for direct drilling and min-till, and we’ve done lots of that.

And I have to say it looks quite nice and the fields will travel well for subsequent operations because they are firmer.

This is very useful on our heavy land as tramlines hold up better. There’s no yield penalty for us over-doing the full monty with the plough.

We’ve some fields that maybe have only been ploughed three times in 20 years and are billiard table level with good soil structure.

However, this autumn we have had the plough out as well for various reasons, and I’m amazed at how well fields have ploughed up.

Twenty years ago, we had shiny and slabby furrows that were light years off being the perfect seedbed. Now it’s like a different farm.

Had I not switched to min till could this have happened? I don’t think so, but I do see nice work being done by farmers where the plough is sacred.

And I’m convinced with timely annual ploughing and incorporated chopped straw and organic manures, it is entirely possible to have a healthy well-structured soil – don’t get too bogged down about carbon release.

Furthermore, if you don’t like the plough you need to love glyphosate. As a result, I’m a Roundup addict, and my habit is costing a fortune. But it’s probably cheaper (I’m not certain on this) than buying diesel and better for the environment (ditto).

However, for all Roundup’s virtues, I find it useless as a bean desiccant. Reglone was the one for that, but it’s gone. So too are our beans which were surprisingly easy to cut and yielded 2.30t but at 27% moisture.