ABSTRACT
Historically, some form of soil disturbance prior to planting crops has been considered a standard procedure. Conventional tillage, typically performed with a moldboard plow, inverts and mixes soil profiles down to 30 cm. This practice loosens the soil, incorporates crop residues, animal manures and fertilizers, destroys weeds, and creates a nearly bare soil surface for planting a crop. Although conventional or deep-tillage agriculture does create an excellent seedbed, this practice has been criticized for at least the past 50 years as a major causative factor in soil erosion [4,23,26].
