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By: Gil Gullickson
Wind and water get their most ink when it comes to the ravages of erosion. Still, the cause of much erosion sits in the sheds of many farms: tillage tools.
That’s what David Lobb, a University of Manitoba soil scientists, told those attending this week’s Conservation Tillage Conference in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Tillage erosion is what it says: the actual movement of soil by tillage. “It is far and away the biggest cause of soil loss, more than wind and water erosion,” he says. “It is the one (erosion form) that dominates the landscape in Canada, the U.S., and every country we looked at around the world.” It also can key wind and water erosion. “Tillage erosion exposes subsoil that is highly erodible to wind and water erosion,” he says.
Tillage erosion has helped fuel the total economic losses of erosion. Lobb pegged soil erosion costs and the value of lost crop yield from 1971 to 2011 in Canada from $40 billion to $60 billion in an analysis he conducted. Even though tools like conservation tillage have helped to slow soil erosion losses in recent decades, economic soil erosion losses remain high. Soil erosion losses are now magnified, as Canadian farmers are now growing high value crops like soybeans compared to wheat and barley as they did in the early 1970s.
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