What do the terms tilling and plowing mean to you? Furrow-slices rolling away behind you like a smooth wake in calm waters; a clean seedbed, chocolate-brown soil nearly ready for the crop? Or perhaps a machine, ripping through a quiet field, soil clods flying, dust rising and carbon oxidizing. Perhaps you have limited experience with farming, but you recall a scene from a favorite childhood film, The Secret of NIMH, in which Ms. Brisby—a cute talking field mouse in a little red cape—desperately struggles to relocate her children from the farm field before the menace of the plow destroys her home and her family.

Whatever your feelings about tillage, it may seem like a fundamentally inextricable part of agriculture itself. Yet the recent no-till farming movement challenges the necessity of tillage. Conventional no-till farmers report that they have slashed fertilizer inputs and increased profitability. Some proponents of the new regenerative farming movement (focused on improving soil health through farm management practices) advance organic no-till as a central practice and blame tillage for soil degradation, soil organic carbon losses, increased erosion, loss of fertility, and increased need for fertilizers and other inputs.