Reduced Tillage Methods for Organic Vegetable Production

You care about the health of your soil, but you’re still tilling, cultivating, or laying plastic to prepare your fields and control weeds more than you would like. What options do you have for reducing soil disturbance and fostering healthy soil on your vegetable farm?

At this workshop, you’ll learn innovative methods for reducing tillage from:

• Dr. Drew Smith from the Rodale Institute, who will share some of the early results from their recent experiments transplanting vegetable crops into strips of winter-killed tillage radish to provide a weed suppressing mulch, and using Yaomen’s plows to provide deep tillage that reduces surfaces disturbance and alleviates sub-surface soil compaction.
• Jenn Halpin from Dickinson College Farm, who will showcase their trials growing tomatoes and peppers into strips of tillage-radish mulch, and share the farm’s other techniques for reducing tillage, such as using a roller crimper to terminate overwintered cover crops.
• Dr. Franklin Egan from PASA, who will share tips and techniques that PASA member farmers are finding effective for reducing tillage, and will discuss the soil health data for Dickinson College Farm he’s collected through our Soil Health Benchmark Study.
• Steve Bogash from Marrone Bio Innovations, who will discuss biopesticides that can be used in place of copper-based pesticides as part of a comprehensive soil health and pest control plan.

You’ll also tour Dickinson College Farm, a 50-acre organic vegetable and pastured-livestock farm that serves the Dickinson College dining halls, a CSA, and local farmers markets.

Cost

Members & non-members: $10. Registration for this event includes dinner.

Questions?

Take a look at our frequently asked questions about our workshops and events. Otherwise, please contact this event’s coordinator, Franklin Egan, by email at franklin@pasafarming.org or by phone at (814) 349-9856 x707.

Image credit: Rodale Institute