Guy around here used to say that his Grandparents owned bottom ground. Knowing that they don't he would wait for someone to ask where was it. Answer was that it is their hill ground that is now in Louisiana. Way too much hill ground around here was farmed for way too long ( and some still is).

So no-till causes great losses of wildlife? but without it hundreds of millions of tilled acres would be well over the 4-5 tons per acre loss due to erosion to maintain the soil base. I guess we have to decide which EVIL we want to lift up or diss. Yes we use more fertilizer per acre today but not because the soil is so barren or poor we are harvesting far more tons of dry matter per acre than a generation ago. With science and better management we are using less nitrogen and othe fertililzar per bushel then even a few decades ago. Due to management and technology we are much more efficient in producing commodities and that is worldwide. Since as late as 1982 we have lost 31 million acres of crop land to development and we also have millions of acres in CRP and other conservation programs which means we are using better practices on fewer acres and millions of much more sensitive acres.
As to chemicals we use far, far less then even 30 years ago. We used to measure active ingredient in lbs. and qts. now it is ounces per acre with minimal carry over with very specific qualities. Several fields have had Round UP or a derivative sprayed on them for decades in a row and yet in one year w/o spraying the fields are filled with native vegetion plants, so long term impacts on soil is minimal at best. Also you can buy seed corn with disease or insect packages that are directed strictly toward a specific pest and not a general insecticide and the favorable insects are not killed like they are with broadcast chemicals like Sevens etc. I am sure that wide usage of inorganic pesticides has some impact on our ecosystems but I don't feel they impact the systems nearly as much as many of you feel they do. We also see significant responses in certain species due to the environmentall manipulation of the environment by man. Row crop farming which we have about 400 million acres of lands itself to good habitat for coons, deer, voles, mice, rats, squirrels and in some cases rabbits. Abandoned buildings and sub division growth expand those even more. There used to be 1 billion acres in farms about the time WW11 ended. Today we are down to 873,000,000 million acres and about half that has never seen a modern day pesticide, GMO or inorganic fertilizer and some of the same population swings are occuring there as well.

Bryce