 One of the functions of soil that farmers most value is its ability to infiltrate or drain and then to hold water for the next crop. Now one may ask, does tillage help or hinder infiltration? It seems so intuitive that if one breaks and mixes the soil with tillage that we actually help the process, right? SDSU's Dr. Tom Schumacher and team did some great research that looked at this very question. We had a rainfall simulator and this is a very large simulator that was used originally in developing the USLE. So we're applying two and three-quarter inches per hour on these plots. That's a one in ten year storm here in South Dakota and we did that on these plots. We had replicated plots and so forth. And what we see here are some of the results. Now they have a little bit of a blue cast to it. This is not snow, this is water pundit on the surface. And the mulbore plow, water pundit on the chisel plow. And then in the no-till, no-water all. And they were receiving the same rate, the same amount. But that two and three-quarter inches per hour was applied over an hour period. And what we're looking at on the top here then is we have probes at 10 cm and at 4 cm, TDR probes. And they're measuring water content on a volumetric basis that would be inches per inch. So we start here basically 100 minutes before we apply the rain. And at zero here is when we start the rainfall. And what you can see here in the 10 cm or roughly 4 inches. You can see an immediate jump showing that water is at that 4 inch level, but not at the 40 cm level. We really don't see any changes there until we're very done with the rainfall. Let's review the results so far. Well first we saw ponding from the mulbore and chisel plow treatments, but none from the no-till treatment. And second we saw almost instantaneous wetting at the 4 inch level, but it took over 50 minutes for any change in soil moisture at 16 inches for that mulbore plow treatment. So what's going on here? Dr. Tom now explains why this happens. So what's happening here is that that upper layer is getting, becoming saturated. Up here we're saturated and now it's ponding. And when it's, as it gets ponded, and that's what we're seeing here, that will start, that ponded applies pressure to the water to get into those smaller pores in the soil. Now when we first started here you get a seal occurring. So now we don't have any macro pores. It's got to get into those small, real small pores. In order to do that you have to have a head of water on the top. But that head of water is on a slope. It's also going downhill till. So you're getting a lot of it moving downhill. In fact, 70% of the water off of the mulbore plow here ended up going downhill. Wow, did you catch that? 70% or 1.8 inches ran off? Yeah, and that means that of the two and three-quarter inches of rain that fell, less than one inch made it into the soil. And very little of that actually made it to 16 inches. That sounds a bit like a paradox here. More tillage, less infiltration? Exactly. Tillage is a quick fix. But it destroys the structure and stability of natural macro pores. As soon as the rain hits, these pores collapse and form that seal. And that's why you see it get really wet at four inches. But the 16 inch layer stays bone dry for over 50 minutes. Join us in our next video as we continue with Dr. Tom, who shows what happens with the no-till and chisel plow system. See you soon. If you're interested in further investigating Dr. Tom Schumacher and team's work, we hope these references prove useful.