Jim Martindale, Defining Tillage by Measures of Soil Health

Jim Martindale began his agronomic and ruminant nutritional consulting career in 1978 as a Brookside Consultant in Northern NY. Now over the past nearly 40 years he has served clients in the Far East, Europe and Australia. He holds three patents for tillage technology which serves farmers on three continents either by license to machine builders or under his own Soil Regeneration Unlimited CurseBuster brand. In this talk, he discusses how far too often farmers find themselves categorizing a tillage practice by the popular acronym associated with a particular type of engineering design. For example, since when did a disk blade become known as something other than a primary or secondary tillage tool? How is it that it can be characterized today as a vertical tillage tool? We need a standard by which all tillage technology can be measured based on its performance results. Soil Health measurements might just prove to be the plumb line we need to stop the trips around the same mountain forever. Tillage can enable farmers to embrace many different soil-building practices or forestall the same. We’ll look at many different ways to add living space to the “house” without having to destroy the main “structure.”

(23.13 MB) (1 hour, 7 minutes, 22 seconds) Recorded at the 2017 Acres U.S.A. Conference, Columbus, Ohio, Friday, December 8, 2017.