By LINDA McGURK
Indiana Correspondent

CAYUGA, Ind. — For Jill Clapperton, no-till isn’t primarily about saving money on labor and fuel. It’s about rebuilding topsoil, boosting biodiversity and ultimately, growing more nutritious crops.
“You’re managing a living thing,” the nationally acclaimed rhizosphere ecologist told more than 150 farmers during a July 30 no-till seminar in Cayuga, Ind.

“When we’re standing on the ground, we’re really standing on the rooftop of another world.”

Soil quality and yield have almost become synonymous terms, but Clapperton challenged farmers to move beyond that definition. “You can’t have high soil quality if you don’t have biological activity and vice versa,” she said during the bi-state seminar, which was organized by the Vermillion County Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD).

And it’s in the rhizosphere, where the roots interact with the soil, that the magic happens.

In a no-till field, the ground is crawling with viruses, bacteria, fungi, algae, mites, nematodes, worms, ants, maggots and other insects and grubs. These animals and microorganisms living belowground cycle nutrients, ultimately improving soil structure and productivity.
“These guys are the most important part of your soil because they’re moving things around and eating them up. They literally chew up pathogens and poop them out,” Clapperton said. “Managing soil quality is about managing these rhizosphere processes.”

The more biodiversity in the soil, the better, Clapperton said, and likened each plant root system to a city that’s bustling with people, buildings, businesses and services.

But, just as tornados occasionally ravage communities aboveground, the animals’ habitat belowground is destroyed every time a disc plow is pulled through a field. When it happens time after time, the microorganisms and insects are eventually unable to recover or rebuild their communities.

“I can tell if you’re doing no-till by looking at the number of beneficial nematodes in the ground,” Clapperton said. “If there are very few, you’re doing conventional tillage; if there are a lot, you’re doing no-till. And if the number is somewhere in between, you’re probably doing some sort of reduced tillage.”

“How many of you produce food?” she asked her audience. Only a few raised their hands. “All of your hands should be up there,” she said, “We need to change this mindset. You’re all growing food, not just commodities.”

Clapperton noted that a lot of grain crops grown with conventional tillage methods are deficient in certain nutrients because of the lack of biological activity in the soil.

But studies have shown that a no-till system with appropriate crop rotation can increase the amount of micronutrients in the grain to the point where they are comparable with organic crops.
A group of no-till farmers in Washington state have taken advantage of that and are able to market their crops at a premium, she said.

Clapperton’s talk really resonated with Lou Stephenson, who is in the process of transitioning a small farm near Logansport, Ind., to organic production.

“She was the reason I came to the no-till seminar. I needed to know more about soil biology,” he said. “As a physiologist, my interest in organic farming came from the nutritional aspect of it and how we can conserve our resources the best we can.”

Les Zimmerman, a Vermillion County SWCD supervisor, was also pleased with Clapperton’s presentation. “The reason why we wanted to cover this topic is that it’s the piece that pulls all the other pieces together. Agriculture is not just about chemistry, it’s about biology too,” he said.

Clapperton initially didn’t have an agricultural background, but became a passionate no-till advocate as a rhizosphere ecologist at Agri-Food Canada, where she worked for 16 years. Now she helps manage a family cattle ranch near Missoula, Mont., and runs the business Earth Spirit Land Resource Consulting.

As an academic from a non-farming background, she said she “asked a lot of silly questions” in the beginning and never suffered from lack of credibility in the ag community. “I don’t have the audacity to tell farmers what to do. I give them the information and then it’s their choice what to do with that information.”