Jon,

I could not agree with you more. I have recently seen ground that had been disc chiseled twice in the last year and every year for who knows how long before that. There was just no structure to the soil anywhere. It was like walking on cake flour in the wife's mixing bowl----EXCEPT where the combine tires had run in recent bean harvest.

Take damp cake flour and run typical combine and grain cart axle loads over it and then you truly DO have a compaction problem in the tire tracks, which seems to necessitate more tillage. As you say, it takes a couple years to get out of this circle.

I stood in one spot with one foot on a combine tire track and my boot did not make a mark on the soil. At the same time my other foot 18" away and not in the tire track sank in to my ankle. It's then easy to show "compaction" even on the surface, not to mention what is 10 or 12" deep.

After a couple years of strip till or no till (not "direct seeding") soils build up a natural structure and can support moderate loads without dramatic differences in soil density. Most reduced tillage systems also control traffic patterns somewhat.

I will repost below one of the pictures from last Thursday's strip till. You will see the two tractor and fertilizer cart tracks 120" apart, running on 2-yr old stalks I believe, in the center but really not very obvious depressions in this 3 year strip tilled field.

Thanks for your post.

Jim at Dawn

(Dawn Strip Till C IL bean stubble 11-09-06 img 3203.JPG)

Dawn Strip Till C IL bean stubble 11-09-06 img 3203.JPG (72KB - 156 downloads)