secondary tillage: tools and concepts

[near horse]

Tim – one of my buddies built one of these last year (modified an “Arena-vator”, whatever that is). He used it yesterday at our plowing event and I was pretty impressed. I felt like tooth harrowing behind him was a disservice. As you say, hard to assess its impact on weeds (we were in wheat stubble) but in one trip it’s breaking up the ground AND breaking the clods into a reasonable bed.

One of the things I recall from Dick R. at Tiller’s was that springtoothing after other tillage (more than once even) will pop the quack grass clumps up/out and, hopefully, get them drying out ……

[Andy Carson]

New tool. Basically a cultivator with wide sweeps. I think there is little chance grass will not be undercut with this tool as the sweeps overlap a full two inches. I am planning on following with a spike tooth harrow to level out the ridges this tool will likely create and to continue to disturb any remaining grass. The threaded rods let me adjust the depth very finely (although not quickly). I find myself not changing depth much once I like a particular depth anyway, and often am frustrated by wanting something inbetween standard settings. I set this for 2.25 inches deep. You can see I only clad half the runners in steel and left the rear just in hardwood. I’ll see how that goes. If t wears too fate, I can just cover the whole thing in steel. I have heard good things about how wood wears on runners so thought I would give it a try in a less stressful situation (IE the rear of a runner). I have two more c tines and sweeps to make for 9 total, but 7 looked like a load, so I’ll see how it goes. I am discing once more to make sure everything is loose before I head out with this thing.

[Tim Harrigan]

Looks good, Andy. The only problem I can see is it will not clear much crop residue with the tines being that close together. At some point you may want to go with 2 gangs with wider spacings between the shanks. There is going to be a lot of torque on those tines, I guess you will see how the wood holds up. Might need a little weight on it to hold it in the ground in firm soil.

[mitchmaine]

nice bit of work andy. i like the sleds. make it look way more stable. tims comment flipped a switch, and i got thinking of tools i’ve seen over the years rooting through gear in old barns. i saw quite a few old wooden harrows, mostly spike but not all, and the successful ones, and by that, i mean the ones that made it or lasted long enough for me to see, seemed to be made in a diamond shape. same horizontal layout, spread over twice the area, presumably to allow the trash to fall off the rig. maybe for stability as well, because i never saw one on runners like yours. all seemed to run on the spikes or shanks alone. they were all pretty well worn out and i never took one or tried one, so i have little experience to share. good luck there and keep posting your progress. mitch

[Andy Carson]

I agree residue might be an issue in some applications. The tines did end up being closer visually than it looked like they would be when I drew this out. It looks a little like a rake. I think for the specific application I have this won’t be a problem, though. The trash in the field is so well chopped up with all the discing I have done that I do not expect it to clogs substantially. I’ll have to see about that. This implement is designed to deal with large trash by pushing it to the side (cultivator style) rather than passign it through. I don’t see this as a problem on an implement in the range of 4 feet wide that operated are a relatively shallow depth. Double that width (or depth), and you might end up with big ridges that might take alot of work to smooth out. If the ridges created by pushing trash to the side are small enough to be harrowed out, I think I might prefer the “push to the side” trash management approach rather than the “pass though” strategy. One reason is that it is difficult to imagine how trash could clog the whole system when it is pushed to the side. I don’t have this problem in the field now with the springtooth, but have had this problem in the past in trashy fields. With multiple gangs (IE with a traditional springtooth), trash often passes though the first gang and gets caught up on the second or third gang, where interferance from the tines in the first and second gang prevent lateral movement of the trash around the rear tines and the trash gets hung up. This caught trash then nets more trash until the whole thing is plugged up tight and you have manually rip out the trash. Wider spacing and fewer tines would likely help to aliviate this problem in a multiple gang situation, but I just wanted to point out that the “multiple gang”, “pass everything thru” setup does have a downside when it comes to plugging that a single gang V setup is less likely to have. If this things makes big ridges, though, I will have little choice but to go with the multiple gang setup. We’ll see.

I’ll also have to see about the strength of the wood. I have actually had pretty good luck with using wood lately to build implement frames (although it have been too weak in some aplpication in the past). You are right about the torque, Tim, but the wood is at a 45 degree angle to the applied torque, which strengthens it substantially. Also, the spring in the C tines helps to reduce the shock load. In my experience, preventing shock loads is incredibly important is wood-based designs. I am also careful to use big washers at the junction points. So, I think the wood frame has a good chance or surviving well enough, but I am not 100% sure. I figure it’s worth a try for th price of wood. Also, it give me a chance to see how this geometry works in the field. Perhaps I need a ground up design change? If so, there is little money lost in the initial wooden design.

PS. It is interesting that you bring up the wooden implements, Mitch. I am very curious how common they were in the past. Perhaps they were very common, but simply rotted much faster than the metal designs?

[near horse]

Just thought I’d throw in this article I found in my archived computer files (they’re starting to seem like an “e-barn” full of stuff I thought was worthy of saving and promptly forgot about). Of course it’s Anne and Eric Nordell

http://www.mofga.org/Publications/MaineOrganicFarmerGardener/Spring2001/Weeds/tabid/1704/Default.aspx

A paragraph:
Their farm was low in fertility and infested with quackgrass when they bought it. They used summer fallow to eliminate the quackgrass, a method they say is “applicable regardless of the size of the farm.” Anne learned about summer fallow when she worked on a large herb farm in Washington state, where the growers would bring the roots up with a chisel plow and let them dry out in the sun over and over during the summer. At Trout Run, she and Eric use a sweep, then a flexible pasture harrow, which shakes the soil off the roots so that they dry and die faster. The technique “is effective as long as you keep the quackgrass from greening, even if it doesn’t dry,” they said. Following the fallow period, they cover cropped the ground with rye in the fall.

BTW – nice work on the cultivator

[dominiquer60]

Looks good Andy, let use know how it works with the trash. I have used a Perfecta which is the tractor equivalent to the Schipshe cultimultcher that Tim posted a picture of. I liked it a lot, it made a heck of a seed bed, would clean of some trash, but if there was a lot of trash you could literally rake it off the field with the Perfecta, ah the joys of 3pt hydraulics.

[Kevin Cunningham]

I was thinking that at a certain scale raking the grass out of the field might be an option. Using a drag rake to the headland then collecting and burning the grass. Seems like more work but maybe worth the initial time investment.

[mitchmaine]

andy, i think dan and jay were on to something when they mentioned the pigs. build yourself a pig tractor, and move it weekly across your field of weeds and see what happens. hogs eat sod. seed, roots and all. out comes pig manure. let the pigs farm your garden for the summer, sprinkle some rye on after the move ahead for cover, and next year you have a weed free plot of ground all tilled and fertilized. they will cover about 2000 sq. ft. before you whack ’em. you could even plant a quick crop behind them, brassicas or something. sounds like a good idea. good enough to try out. we just bought two feeder pigs to try out on the fallow side of our bean field. i’ll let ya know how they do.
mitch

[Andy Carson]

Yes, Mitch, I would be very interested in how this works out. Particularly in knowing exactly how many pigs root out exactly how much land in a specific amount of time. Last I did this calculation, I ended up needing a large number of pigs to do the work at a pace I considered useful. From a short read, it seems the number of pigs required for this and how much land they cover in a given amount of time is extremely varied. You are coming up with the number that each pig covers 2000 square feet before you slaughter them? That means it would take 22 to cover an acre… This is not too far from the numbers I was coming up with but I just don’t want that many pigs. I will be very curious to hear what you come up with in your experiment and if the numbers are close. Please keep us in the loop. I am very interested in pigs being part of a management scheme, even if they are not doing all the heavy lifting. Perhaps I could disc and then turn some out on disced ground. Perhaps this would allow them to cover 10 times the ground? I could see this kind of mixed tillage being effective… Just playing with the idea…

[mitchmaine]

i’m experimenting as well here. and yes, i have turned the soil that they are starting on. at 35 pounds, they aren’t the roto-tillers you might expect in the start. i am also planning on bucketing in small amounts of fresh horse and cow manure to them to extract the remaining grain and further fertilize the ground. that also sounds like importing new weeds, but its an experiment so why not. i’ll keep you informed, good news or poor.
mitch

[Kevin Cunningham]

My experiement with pigs ended in a hardpan and more compaction than a tractor makes. Durring the summer the ground was too hard for them to turn and in the winter I had so much mud that it was almost impossible to walk out there. The pointy little hooves just worked that mud into cement. I think there is a time window where they would be big enough and the ground conditions would be such that they would work it up perfectly, but you would need about 20 full sized pigs per acre to work the ground when you need it turned. Then what do you do with them? They tear up your good pasture, fill up your barn and promply destroy things, or spend the winter knee deep in mud. My experience was, pig are not great as rototillers but they made damn good bacon. I’ll probably grow some more this year but and rotate them but I am not counting on them to do any farming for me.

[dominiquer60]

My experience with tilling hogs is similar to Kevin’s. In a fine sandy loam (so sandy it was mine out for dairy bedding) we had 6 pigs on 1/4 to 1/3 of an acre. If you have a weed or grub that that they like it helps promote tillage, we had bindweed, but inevitably they did not till the ground that was used as their open bathroom. Even in this very sandy soil after a couple months they had tilled all that they would, but it turned out that it was too long, the ground had compacted hard for sand. We ended up borrowing the neighbors chisel plow to break up the ground so that the rain could penetrate. They did work rather well in the hedge row to loosen things up and uncover treasures, something that we would not take the time to clean up had they not uncovered it all.

[Rivendell Farm]

Here is a quackgrass control idea I don’t actually recommend, but I know of someone who used it. He was summer fallowing a large field, hoping to get it clear of all weeds and debris so he could use a rock picker on it. The constant dragging resulted in too many quack grass roots on the surface. They still clogged up the rock picker. Being an innovative thinker, he tried raking the roots into windrows with a side delivery hay rake. The next logical step was to bring out the baler. Yes, he actually baled the quackgrass roots to get them off the field. He did say it was awful hard on the baler. Bob

[Andy Carson]

I got a chance to test the cultivator, modify it, and do about 1/3 of an acre. The modifications included 1) adding some weight (about 100 lbs) to keep it from walking on the points 2) reducing the number of tines from 9 to 7 (to reduce over all drag) and 3) adding some wide washers to keep the c tines from denting the soft wood. After all this the cultivator is freaking awesome! It does push a little dirt/trash in the center, but it doesn’t have far to tumble to reach the edge. The effect is that the clumps of grass are tumbled around until the dirt is off the roots. Perfect! The amount fo weight it takes to keep the points in the ground varies alot with moisture (even from day to day), so ut is good that I can adjust it by adding if subtracting blocks. I think that because I am trying to keep minimal weight on the skids, they will wear slowly. It’s way too early to tell about this. It does pull substantially harder than a regular springtooth, maybe 50% harder per foot, so my swath is smaller, but i dont’ have to go over it again and again. This tool is highly recommended, and pretty easy to make. 🙂

[Author]

Posts