How Bardwell Farm is Experimenting with Tillage to Adapt and Advance Soil Health
For the past three years, American Farmland Trust (AFT) has awarded small grants to Massachusetts farmers who are implementing soil health practices. From cover crop seeds to compost, the program has supported 71 farmers across the Commonwealth.
In 2024, three farmers were selected for AFT’s new Soil Health Innovator Award, which included additional funding and a commitment to host field days in Spring 2025 to highlight the successes and challenges of the practices they implemented.
On two June days, between the raindrops of a very wet and cool spring, farmers, service providers, and educators gathered for two of the field walks hosted at Bardwell Farm and Astarte Farm.
Bardwell Farm, operated by ninth-generation farmer Harrison Bardwell in Hatfield, is a conventional IPM diversified mixed vegetable operation spread across owned and leased land. At this scale, mechanical labor is optimized with the goal of minimizing hand labor as much as possible. Harrison’s main goal: Keep the ground covered and something alive in the fields as much as possible.
With support from AFT grants and other sources, Harrison has experimented with a mix of no-till, reduced-till, and traditional tillage systems for various crops. Bardwell Farm is a conventional IPM diversified vegetable operation that utilizes different tillage systems for various crops. Currently, the biggest opportunity for fields to be in prolonged no-till is when corn is planted in the same field for successive years. Adapting this system for rotating vegetable crops has proved to be more challenging, which has pushed Harrison to develop other strategies for managing water and weed pressure.
During the field walk, Harrison shared insight from using a no-till precision planter that cuts a furrow into cover crop residue, drops the seed, and closes it with one pass. He explained that residue management is really the name of the game with a seeder like this, and factors, such as height and the direction that the stalks fall, impact the efficacy of the tool and its ability to properly cover seeds in a way that is necessary for consistent germination. Though a roller crimper can help improve outcomes, Harrison doesn’t currently have access to one. However, in the past, he has successfully seeded corn and winter squash using this method, which has resulted in greater consistency.
Residue challenges, reduced soil warmth, and poor seed-to-soil contact in no-till systems led Harrison to explore zone tillers, which create a 10-15” planting strip of lightly tilled soil in a field of terminated cover crop. In 2024, he received a Soil Health Minigrant to purchase one for winter squashes and cucumbers. Harrison also sees potential for transplanting brassicas, alliums, and nightshades.
The high level of Phytophthora in the Pioneer Valley has pushed him to a conventional 4” raised, biodegradable plastic mulched bed. High humidity, frequent rains, saturated soils, puddling, and wet canopy cover all create ideal conditions for Phytophthora, an oomycete that can devastate entire cucurbit plantings in just a few days. While no-till systems can result in increased soil moisture and holding capacity, as well as a stronger resilience response to flooding and droughts, these benefits still take time to develop. At this point, the soil conditions at Bardwell Farm, following heavy rains, often result in environments highly conducive to Phytophthora proliferation, regardless of the tillage system.
To address this, Harrison is using the raised bed system to aid in drainage; mulching with white biodegradable plastic to reduce fertilizer runoff and moderate soil temperatures; planting bush-type varieties to reduce plant canopy sprawl; planting in a sandy field to maximize drainage potential; and, because the area is experiencing warmer weather for longer, shifting planting dates by three to four weeks later to avoid what has become a frequent occurrence of heavy July rainstorms.
The walk concluded with a demonstration of the NRCS In-Field Soil Health Assessment (IFSHA), led by Matthew Karas from the Hampden-Hampshire Conservation District. This interactive demo gave farmers a hands-on look at the assessment process and allowed participants to ask questions about how they might use the assessment on their farms.
Discover more about Bardwell Farm here.
The third and final Soil Health Innovator field walk will take place in the Spring of 2026 at Jared’s Farm. It was rescheduled to accommodate the farmer’s needs.
These awards, and 68 others, were made possible by funding from the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources. Field walks with soil health innovators were one of the final milestones in a five-year project aimed at advancing soil health across Massachusetts. For more information about the Massachusetts Coordinated Soil Health Program (MACSHP), please email Kevin Antoszewski at [email protected].
