In your country, do farmers burn off the stubble that remains after crops have been harvested ? In my country its done & it causes a huge pollution problem & it creates a lot of complaints from towns folk when they have smoke coming thru their neighbourhoods. There must be a better & non polluting way to get rid of crop stubble surely ?
There Is Indeed.....Mulch It......Better For The Soil And Better For The Environment...... Cheers Glen.
i've never seen it done that way, and i spent a majority of my life in farm country. i think pretty much everyone just ends up plowing it under.
Depending where you go here in the US, some farmers still do that. Unless things have changed in recent years. A lot of times I think it depends on which crop they're planning on planting next. Oddly enough, even the wildlife conservation department hosts controlled burns! Usually of various fields of grass or flowers to make way for different species of plants. It actually does have it's uses and provides the soil with certain nutrients more easily, faster and more naturally than any other way. They should be doing it on slightly windy days though, so that it burns correctly and like you mentioned, doesn't bother the neighboring townsfolk. Letting the wind disperse the smoke properly without so much wind as to cause it to burn uncontrollably.
In the country I live in . a fair majority of farmers burn the remaining stubble to get rid of any bugs in top soil
Across the Great Plains of North America, fire is part of the cycle, but too damn many people now dwell there, so fire is suppressed. (this applies in the forests, but that's a different topic) No fire, no bison. So, plowing under is used heavily, especially if cover crops are used for erosion control and nitrogen fixing. Last line I saw crop clearing with fire was in Jamaica. It was January, so...sugar?
In the Pine Barrens, controlled burning is conducted by the State Forest Service. The idea is to burn off accumulated dead vegetation off the forest floor. in the Pine Barrens, silica soils do not contain the worms and microbes that would otherwise process out the detritus off the forest floor. The Forest Service wants to prevent a huge fire by claiming the combustibles in small regular burns.
That is all I have seen done here. Sometimes people burn ditches but in the fields it's always tilled under.
