I am a newbie gardener and after having read around various gardening topics Charles book “Organic Gardening, the natural no dig way” has convinced me to attempt the no dig approach.
My question however is, that whilst no dig may very well be one of the best gardening principles on a smaller scale, say in a garden or allotment, but how practical is it on a larger scale? Say if someone has 5 or even 10 acres in which they want to grow large amounts of crop like wheat, surely they cannot use the no dig approach becasue where on earth will they make or find that much compost or manure and to buy it in will be far too expensive. Or what if everyone in the world resorted to no dig, then surely it is not practical as there is not enough compost or maure in the world to cover all farming land?
What I write about is small scale, intensive gardening for high ourput and low maintenance. Its an approach that can scale up to an acre or more, I grew no dig on 7 acres in the 1980s, using less compost than I do now.
On a larger scale it is “no till farming” as practised on millions of acres, mosty in subtropical and often quite dry climates. The energy saved from not ploughing is a lot, moisture is conserved and yields are good, from mulching with organic matter left by a previous crop, or lightly tilling it in to have a shallow seedbed. Farmers crop land less intensively than gardeners!
A snag with no till in Britain is slugs hiding in the surface (mosty unrotted) organic matter, and its the main reason why no till is slower to be adopted in our damp climate. Nonetheless, the priciple of respecting soil structure is the same.
It also depends on what you grow. For some crops there is no problems with slugs. In Austria temperate cold climate one man grows various crops with no till, hectares of land. Manfred Wenz has successfully developed no-till techniques for direct seeding of commercial grain crops, all while building up the vitality and organic matter of his soil. http://www.goveganic.net/article204.html
In my opinion, gardeners will take care of food for future, real food – grains aren’t really good food for humans. Anyway, i grew this way on smaler scale alsowith various veggies, no slug problem here, so it worked eventhou it’s damp climate.
