No-Till Weed Reduction

[Stowed4Sea]

Is there any way to get ground that is no-tilled to have less weeds?
I'm not asking you to add anything, just stating some facts in case it was easy to change so it is more like real life.

No-till research is proving that because you are not breaking the ground and making a nice seedbed for weeds every spring, that there are significantly less weeds in a field that had a no-till planter. Similar to your soil mod, seeds can stay active in the ground for several years, even when cultivated, and cultivating fresh in the spring before planting sure makes a pretty field for planting, but also puts weeds in prime growing soil.

The benefits for cultivating and plowing are obvious, where you work lime, cover crops and manure into ground for better effect. However with no-till, you only work the ground where something is already growing that will take over weeds in that same row in a few weeks anyway. Just a thought, I'm not sure how hard this would be to implement, but just thought I'd throw it out there for your information.

PS: No-Till often gets a bad rap, but it is because it is often not used properly and most importantly, there is no money involved. Farmers can trade several pieces of equipment in for just one. Lots of equipment manufacturers hate this. Furthermore, guess where universities and other research studies get their funding? No-till isn't sexy and is not researched near as thoroughly. Fertilizer companies also hate no-till because they lose money from spraying less. Lots of bad publicity says no-till gets more weeds, but if that was true, fertilizer companies would be urging everyone to go no-till. However the opposite is true. The truth is it gets a bad rap because it is under researched, underfunded or guys do it half heatedly. They have a no-till planter but still plow in the fall and or cultivate in the spring. While it is true that with 100% no-till you take a small hit to yield on soil compaction, you are at the very least protecting your most valuable asset in soil. Conventional farming practices causes farmers to lose literally tons of their topsoil every year.

Again, I'm not sure how you would model this in game. Somehow giving small yield penalty on compaction if land was not tilled, but having many less weeds if field was 100% no-till. Seems pretty difficult and would probably cancel each other out in the short term as they do in real life (no-till is really all about soil conservation). Anyway, this wasn't really an issue, but I saw others posting ideas based on real life. I'm not sure if it is OK, but I followed their lead and just wrote this as an FYI.

[DeckerMMIV]

I had a quick though about this "no-till and less weeds and soil compaction", and relate it to lindbejb's post on FS-UK.

it will not be possible with SoilMod 2.x, as it will most likely require a third foliage-multi-layer to store the 'soil compaction' information in.

Also someone asked me, via private-message, if it was possible to have the stubble NOT magically vanish when seeding on a no-tilled field, so it becomes more like 'true life'. - For that, there might be a method, but it again involves a custom foliage-multi-layer.

Adding all these foliage-multi-layers, will increase computer requirements and in a multiplayer game cause longer synchronization times. So it is a balancing act - _which apparently many "high detail 3D-model"-makers don't understand_ - to not 'over do it', as players expect their gaming-computer to handle _everything_ thrown at it. And next they complain about a "laggy" game experience, because they have these 100+ different "highly detailed, multi textured" mods loaded and active in the game.

Maybe in a future SoilMod, if GIANTS Software don't nerf/hide too much in their next game, for us script-modders.