 My name is Anu Rangarajan, I'm in the Department of Horticulture at Cornell University and we're here at the Homer C. Thompson Vegetable Research Farm. We are doing some research here on trying to figure out how to reduce tillage in vegetable production systems for the northeast. And so we are focusing on primarily zone tillage systems because we think they're the best for our conditions in the upper northeast where it's cooler. In zone tillage, we're only disturbing about an 8-inch band of soil across the whole field. That's where we're going to be planting. You can work that zone fairly shallow in traditional zone tillage which is a 3- to 4-inch depth using a set of coltors. Or we can work deep. And we'd be wanting to work deep where we have some compaction layers that we want to break up. This is our zone builder. It is made by Unvephirth and there's other types of zone builders available from other companies. This requires about 30 to 50 horsepower per shake and a tractor with a high clearance hitch. In front you have a set of cutting discs that cut through residue in the soil. Following that is this deep tillage shank. The shank is a very hard steel that allows it to travel 12 to 18 inches deep even in the soil. Behind that it's followed by pilling discs. These actually hill up the soil and create a mound that creates a very nice planting zone and then these rolling baskets break up any clods in the soil. So zone tillage is an improvement over conventional tillage because you are only working a narrow piece of ground. Using an implement like this it allows us in one pass to prepare the planting area for a particular crop. We've done this with a lot of large seeded vegetable crops including sweet corn and beans and pumpkins which are the most popular vegetables right now to do in zone tillage. And we're also exploring transplanted crops such as peppers, tomatoes and cabbage. In the future we hope to be able to do this also with root crops and smaller seeded crops. It's a big advantage over conventional tillage because here you only make one pass. You don't have to plow a disc. The advantages of that is that you can serve fuel, you can serve time and you enhance soil quality by not inverting the soil. Here we're demonstrating the zone tiller in a Sudex cover crop. We've used it in killed cover crop as well as a living cover crop because it's quite aggressive and it can handle that type of residue. Zone tillage doesn't require fancy equipment. We started out with this fairly simple tool which involves three wavy coulters that create that shallow zone on and on a toolbar. And we have them space 30 inches for our crops the way we plan here. We make the decision on how deep to run our deep tillage based upon soil compaction because that deep shank that you saw is it's important that that runs just below a compaction zone. So it's important to have a pentatometer in the field with you when you start doing this type of work.