Can no-till fill the bill for rolling plains Wheat producers?
Texas Wheat and cattle go hand-in-hand on the Texas Rolling Plains. Farmers there use winter Wheat as a grain crop and as a grazing crop to feed young cattle. “Conventional land preparation for a Wheat crop requires considerable time, labor, equipment and fuel,” said John Sij, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station agronomist. “All of those factors, especially fuel, are getting more and more expensive.” Sij is based at the Texas A&M University System Agricultural Research and Extension Center here. “There are alternatives to conventional tillage, namely no-till and reduced-till, but they haven’t been studied much where Wheat and cattle are grown together in one production system,” he said. No-till is just what the name implies–virtually no land preparation or weed control tillage. In reduced-till, farmers simply cut back on some of their tillage operations. Research in several crops has shown that both systems can reduce production costs without reducing yields, Sij said. In 2001, Sij
