Club of bologna proceedings

Tim CHAMEN
We talk about deeper ploughing where you’ve 
got a lot of heavy machinery. The problem 
with that is that the deeper you plough, the 
deeper the vulnerability of the soil becomes. 
In other words, if you plough to 20 cm the soil 
would be vulnerable to 20 cm from following 
vehicles. If you plough to 30 or 40 cm, almost 
certainly you will now be vulnerable to 30 or 
40 cm. In our discussions recently we actually 
proposed that perhaps we ought to have a 
plough-pan, because the plough-pan protects 
the subsoil. If you can have a porous plough-
pan, maybe that would be the ideal. It would 
allow water through and rake roots through, 
but actually hold the machines up. So I’m not 
sure I’ve got an answer to that, but I think 
that there are just a number of points that 
one needs to think about, in planning these 
operations.
 
Osamu KITANI 
Japan 
I think that more emphasis could have been 
put on the energy aspects, because as you 
know, most of the world’s farmers are still 
putting one third of the energy of the total 
operations into tillage. And on the other hand, 
we have an international movement for 
minimising energy input in order to reduce the 
very serious problem of CO
2
 emissions. In 
other industries, energy saving has been 
achieved remarkably well, but in the field of 
agricultural machinery we have been using 
the same plough for hundreds of years - or a 
thousands years maybe - and I think there is 
some scope for the development of new 
hardware. Also, we haven’t been doing many 
new systems for tillage, but I think we should 
put more effort on the hardware itself, in 
terms of energy reduction for example. 
Another point I’d like to make for future work 
is that we need better implements for 
handling the green manure system, because in 
order to reduce the energy inputs and costs, 
and also the environmental impact, in the 
future we will need more green manure 
system. And I don’t think we have very good 
tools for handling green manure systems. So 
we need to develop new machines for that.