Max Carter’s Coffee County farm doesn’t impress you with its
neatness. “I like my
farming on the trashy side,” Carter chuckled as he checked
his cotton and peanut
fields.

The beauty of Carter’s farm, though, is beginning to catch
the
eye of more than one
beholder. The scruffy look of crops planted into the stubble of
previous crops hides a
simple success a growing number of farmers are embracing.

“It’s hard to say for sure how many farmers are using
conservation tillage,”
said Glen Harris, an Extension Service crop and soil scientist
with the University of
Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

“We’ve been saying 15 percent of row crops,” Harris
said. “Last year,
though, I really think it might have been as high as 20 percent
or even 25 percent.”

Planting in
Strips

Traditionally, farmers make as many as five passes over their
land in the process of
tilling their soil and planting their crops.

Carter and others who use conservation tillage don’t do all
that plowing. They use
strip tillage equipment to plant rows of summer crops into the
stubble of small-grain
winter crops.

“It saves a lot of time and money,” Harris said.
“It has a lot of other
benefits, too. It greatly improves the soil’s water-holding and
nutrient-holding capacity.
For years, we promoted it as a means to control soil erosion.
But
now, the economics are
making it catch on.”

Carter said he started his “ugly farming” on a small
scale. “I started
playing with this with soybeans behind wheat 24 years ago,”
he said. “I’ve been
farming since 1954. I call myself doing it wrong for 20 years.
We
plowed these fields a
tremendous amount. We built ponds and pumped water.

Less Plowing,
Watering

“And finally, after 20 years,” he said, “we
realized we weren’t getting
a lot accomplished. Over the past 24 years, we’ve grown into a
no-till situation.”

Now, Carter has crops growing on his 200 acres virtually
year-round. He usually makes
nearly two bales of cotton per acre and has equally impressive
peanut yields. But he
spends far less money and effort to produce his crops.

“We don’t irrigate anymore since we quit plowing,”
he said. “We sold off
the irrigation equipment. We maintain enough straw on the land
to
give us a kind of mulch
to preserve the water that falls.”

Less Labor,
Too

Near the end of the season, Carter still hadn’t put any
insecticide on his cotton or
peanuts. “We attribute that to beneficial insects,” he
said. “They come in
and work the fields.”

Other than Carter, only the insects work his fields.
“After I got into no-till,
all my help wanted to work at Wal-mart or uptown, so I started
doing it all myself,”
he said. “And I take a swing at a golf ball once in a
while.”

Carter won’t say he’s making big money. “We’re saving
money, naturally, from less
plowing and less chemicals,” he said. “If we’re going
out of business, we’re at
least going out slower.”

Improved Soil
Quality

He and Harris agree that conservation tillage’s single
greatest benefit is improved
soil quality.

“Everything goes back to building the organic matter in
the soil,” Harris
said. “That’s a real challenge, especially in our sandy
south Georgia soils. It’s not
a one-year thing. But a farmer should see a real difference in
three to five years.”

Carter figures the new millennium will see more of this
low-input farming.
“Conservation-tillage people will be the ones to bring the
flag out when it’s all
over,” he said.

“They can stay longer than a person who’s wearing out
tractors and letting his
topsoil leave while he’s sleeping,” he said. “If you
don’t have a healthy
topsoil, you’ll lose somewhere — now or the next
generation.”