Tilling requires less cognitive and logistical effort: you just apply calories to drag a blade through the soil and then dump seed in it. No-till requires things like “tracking the soil’s water retention levels”, “planting cover crops or even giving a field a year off”, and other such steps that in general can be summarized as “cost centers”.

Given the economic climate, few non-corporate farmers can afford that investment without the collapse of their farm, and few corporate farmers (none at nationwide scale, afaik) are willing to invest in cost centers that threaten to decrease, rather than increase, their rate of profit growth year-over-year. One could absolutely make a case that regulatory investment in such things be imposed upon megacorp farms first, with their processes and technology made available by subsidy to smaller farms; it would be enough to structure the subsidy as inversely proportional to the acreage reaped for value, with some language ensuring that the cost of investment into land farmed by contract to a megacorp is paid to the land operator. To prevent certain abuses, they’d also have to modify farming contract law to make maintaining long-term use of the land an inalienable right, so that unsustainable output-quota farming contracts are unenforceable.

This is an unlikely outcome in the U.S., but I still appreciate the researches providing more evidence in support of it.

The other replies make fair points, but tillage does still have it's uses.

Quick examples:

  - Inversion tillage (ploughing) to bury green manure crops or bulky organic manure
  - Subsoiling (deep tillage) can help break underground compaction, to allow better root penetration
  - Working with soils prone to surface capping

  - Full inversion tillage
  - Low/min-till
  - No-till

EDIT: This is a response to the question "why do it?" rather than anything in the context of the article itself.

No till requires access to first world country technology to make work. No till in the United States and similar countries is very very very established practice. It's not less work by any means, it's just a different kind of work with different machinery.

Source: was full time farmer until Grandpa died.

I'm guessing less developed countries still till the soil? I have no idea.

In short term profits vs long term benefits, we all know who wins.

If you want to till, you need quite a big tractor that burns quite a lot of diesel to drag a cultivator through the soil. This is not the same as a plough, but at some point you'll end up ploughing.

Go and stick a spade in your garden and then try and drag it sideways. Yeah, not easy, eh? Bit too much to do by hand.

If you want to do "no till", you can get away with a less powerful tractor because you don't need to drag a cultivator through the soil, you just need one that can carry a 400 litre sprayer that blasts glyphosate all over everything every couple of weeks.

Eventually all that's left are the glyphosate-resistant plants that are choking out your crops.

And that's if your soil conditions are actually in any way suitable for no-till, which they often aren't.

Because no-till doesn't scale. It's incredible for market gardening to feed the rich who can pay a premium at a farmers market, but it's not going to feed the world.