This book is a much-expanded and updated edition of a previous volume, published in 1996 as No-tillage Seeding: Science and Practice. The base objective remains to describe, in lay terms, a range of international experiments designed to examine the causes of successes and failures in
no-tillage. The book summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of no tillage and highlights the pros and cons of a range of features and options, without promoting any particular product. Topics added or covered in more detail in the second edition include:
- soil carbon and how its retention or sequestration interacts with tillage and no-tillage
- controlled traffic farming as an adjunct to no-tillage
- comparison of the performance of generic no-tillage opener designs
- the role of banding fertilizer in no-tillage
- the economics of no-tillage
- small-scale equipment used by poorer farmers
- forage cropping by no-tillage
- a method for risk assessment of different levels of machine sophistication