Jim,

Planing simi dwarf winter wheat and terminating with Round Up just as it
heads and planting no till cotton in it works well. Using Round Up and other
herbicide to control the weeds. The cover shades the ground and reduces
evaporation and breaks the impact of the rain drops on the soil so it
doesn't seal over as badly. That's not a problem in your 2 inch per hour
rainfall events. I don't now how hard it rains here I have been caught out
in a 10 inch per hour rain and it most of it came in 25 or 30% of the hour.
Most of the time you could see to drive.

The big advantage we are seeing from no till is increasing organic matter
and increasing of invertebrates and soil microbes.

The kind of solid I have that makes a difference. It is mostly a granite
based soil that is just various sizes of worn out sand down to a 40 foot
red bed http://www.couger.com/microscope/carl/sand.jpg The top soil is just
organic matter and dust that the grass trapped over the eons it was prairie.
The Red River is a juncture of two colliding plates that pushed up Wichita
Mountains and the oldest geological feature in the US. As you get close to
the mountains there is granite sand still visible.

Gordon


"Jim Webster" wrote in message
...

"Archimedes Plutonium" wrote in message
...


I mow my lawn about 9 times per year and it is about 1 acre. Each mowing
costs me in about 75 cents of gasoline or 1/2 gallon. So, if I had my
lawn
turned into alfalfa and then planted rows of corn, my yearly cost to
grow
Organic corn would be about ten dollars. I am guessing that the special
corn seed that is herbicide resistant applied to an acre in the petrol
based
farming alone costs more than ten dollars. So, not counting the mower
versus the tractor and I can get a excellent Honda mower that lasts for
20 years for $300. but a tractor is what $100,000.

Hmmm
His excellent Honda mower does 9 acres a year, lasts twenty years, so is
good for 180 acres. It does this 180 on 4.5 gallons.
Ignoring fuel that is $1.66 per acre


Our contractor can mow at least 100 acres a day (small fields) with
tractor
and mower that cost somewhere around the $100K new, but will also last at
least ten years.
In the course of a 3-month season he will do about 10,000 acres (some of
it
two or three times) but will also cart slurry and do a lot of other jobs
as
well.
So by my reckoning over the ten years and ignoring fuel, this is $1 an
acre.
Mind you, to be a fair comparison we would also have to see how good
Achimedes's excellent Honda mower is at carting slurry.

Note Archimedes kilfiled me years back because I kept doing this sort of
calculation

Jim Webster