Don’t think that tilling the land is a simple matter: leading a big yellow ox or driving a tractor, pulling a plow back and forth across the field a few times and you’re done. In fact, there is a lot of knowledge and reasoning behind tilling the land.
Tilling the land, like fluffing cotton, is mainly about loosening the soil. However, while fluffing cotton just needs to loosen the cotton, tilling sometimes requires deep plowing and sometimes shallow plowing.
Take rice fields, for example. People carry out deep plowing in the autumn and winter after the rice has been harvested. This deep plowing lasts until the following spring when seedlings are planted, spanning a long period. During this time, whenever it rains or snows, since the soil has been deeply plowed, it easily accumulates moisture, storing a large amount of water for the growth of rice the following year. Additionally, the soil after deep plowing is often looser with more gaps, which is unsuitable for immediate planting. However, over the winter, the soil gradually becomes more compact.
In the spring of the second year, when the rice fields are plowed for spring planting, shallow and dense plowing is required. This is because right after this plowing, seedlings will be planted. The shallow and dense plowing mainly serves to make the surface soil looser. As for the deeper soil, since it has been loosened by deep plowing in the winter, it is already loose enough. If it were deeply plowed again in the spring, it would not only be redundant but would also disperse the accumulated moisture and make the soil too loose, which would be detrimental to the growth of the rice.