[daniel grover]

After seeing these cultivators and meeting Jelmer Albada (who found and imported them from Europe), I am really excited about the potential of this or a similar tool to enable higher density planting for draft-cultivated vegetable/row crop farms.

I’m curious if anyone here has seen any examples of similar cultivators from around the world.

I found a couple of US patents that are for somewhat similar cultivators. However, it is hard to tell how well engineered they are from the drawings.

Here they are:

Multiple Row example one

Multiple Row example two

Getting a shop/company here in the states to fabricate something similar could help to enable farmers to transition to using more draft power on their farms.

The most impressive thing about the Melotte cultivator and the other one which Jelmer brought to the DAPFDs this year was how thoughtfully designed they were. Tool bars could be removed and replaced with ease (in some cases without additional tools), needed tools were mounted on the machine itself. They are just well designed pieces of equipment.

Getting a shop/company here in the states to fabricate something similar could help to enable farmers to transition to using more draft power on their farms.

Especially impressive in what they are doing at Roxbury, is that with these tools, they are able to use their current tractor-based bed making, seeding, planting, etc. systems and do the cultivation with horses. It seems to me that one of the biggest obstacles to shifting to draft cultivation is the idea that you have to completely change your cropping system to fit the available tools. The McCormick, JD, etc cultivators are all set up for single row use which works great for what they were designed for (row cropping) and also works great for a bioextensive system such as the Nordells. But there are a lot of good reasons that a farmer would want to plant more biointenstively–land limitation, need for higher yield, etc.

[daniel grover]

still available? where are you located?

[daniel grover]

as someone who is just beginning to farm vegetables with horses, I’m finding the book invaluable. i don’t know of any other resources that do what this book does. thanks for writing it..

[daniel grover]

Looks great– How did you find this cultivator? Sure would be fun to do twice the work with half the horse.

[daniel grover]

I have heard about mowing cover crop like that in transport mode–will your mower mow when lifted?

I specifically heard about it with Rye and Vetch–mow the rye in transport mode once it starts to produce pollen, then disk or crimp the vetch once it is in full bloom a couple of weeks later.

[daniel grover]

Thanks to everyone who came out to the hack! The past couple of posts on our blog have talked about the hack and also include some photos. See them here: Two Spruce Farm@Northland Sheep Dairy. We’re still working on the project and will update the blog and here as we progress.

 

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