Where can I find education on tillage attachments?

[canoetrpr]

I have to admit I am completely confused about the many different types of attachments one finds for tillage. I suspect that there is many a new tractor / land owner like me that is in this boat.

Can anybody point me in the right direction where I might find information regarding why one would use one of these implements over another for tillage:

- disk harrow
- roto tiller
- cultivator
- a plow - what are the major types and what are they used for?

Is there one you would use over another to break sod into earth that can be planted with a crop for the first time?

Is there one you would use over another for plowing the land in the spring for planting vs. plowing the land in the fall after harvest.

I have a bunch of pasture right now and I hear from some of the neighbours that one ought to "plow" the pasture once in a way to work up the soil. Trying to figure out if I should be looking into this while I have no animals yet but I have NO CLUE where to start.

Would one of these implements work better over another with a compact tractor for working up unplowed pasture? I have a Kubota L3400 - 27 hp at the PTO.

Any and all advice is appreciated

 

[Farwell]

Go to Ebay and look for a book titled THE OPERATION, CARE AND REPAIR OF FARM MACHINERY. The book is a bit dated but has some very good basic information. The copy I have is from my freshman year of high school Farm Shop class in 1958-1959. I still use it for a reference once in a while.
Good luck.
Farwell

 

[rozett]

When I am looking for books, especially older ones that are no longer in print, I use ABE Books. It's a collaboration of small bookstores throughout the country. I have always found what I was looking for and never been disappointed with the results. I did a quick check on the aforementioned book and they have dozens of copies for about $10.

 

[Farmwithjunk]

Dated? Try OLD! Still usefull info today. Maybe more so now than back when the 28th and final edition of "The Operation, Care and Repair of Farm Machinery" was new in 1958. Shows new 20 series 2-cylinder Deere tractors throughout.

 

[chatcher]

This is one of those subjects on which you will not find universal agreement. For each one of those implements, you can find a dozen experts telling you why they should or should not be used.

A moldboard plow (bottom plow) physically turns over the soil, placing what was on top a considerable depth below the surface. Advocates say this really loosens the soil and gets rid of the sod or weed seeds or crop residue. Others will say it puts the organic material too deep to be properly decomposed, compacts the subsoil (tractor tires running in the furrows), causes erosion, and destroys the soil structure and beneficial organisms (worms, fungi, and bacteria).

I decided not to plow or disc, and instead bought a rototiller. My plan is to work the soil as deep as I can just once, and from then on switch to primarily "no-till" techniques. I have a small place, so I probably won't be using things like planting drills. I am going to use green manure cover crops, organic and living mulches, and earthworms to build up my soil as time goes on. After the first round of tilling, I won't use the tiller except very lightly on the surface to work in organic material, and plan to try not even doing that in some places. It is amazing how deep the roots of some cover crops will go, and it seems to me millions of tiny roots piercing their way down through my subsoil and later decomposing will do more for my soil than any mechanical implement.

There is a wealth of information on the web. Search on plow or tillage or no-till or cultivation or soil building or anything else you can think of . If you are interested in building soil, I recommend www.sare.org. They have a lot of material online in PDF format, including this one: Building Soils for Better Crops

Of course, many generations of farmers have plowed, disc'ed, and fertilized with success, so there is more than one way to go.

 

[farm23]

Thank you "farwell", "rozett" & "chatcher". I have ordered this good old book and will look up sare.org. I was looking for this exact information since I just got 3 acres I want to garden.

 

[N80]

Check out this thread, which I probably posted in the wrong place. Lots of good info:

http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/showflat.php/Cat/0/Board/genoperating/Number/869566/page/0/view/collapsed/sb/5/fpart/1/vc/1/o/all

 

[RalphVa]

Hopefully, you could find mostly what you needed from what the other guys refered you to.

I used some moldboard plows, disc plows, discs and harrows when I was a kid. More recently, I used a rotary plow on my Gravely. The moldboard plows, disc plow and the rotary plow are devices for breaking new ground that often has a lot of vegetation that you have to turn over to kill it. The rotary plow (photo attached, in case you've never seen one) is about my favorite for small tractors and patches. My favorite for doing lots of ground is the disc plow. It'll carve around rocks and tree stumps that a moldboard plow may poke into (and I don't know how you'd easily get dislodged from a stump if that happened).

A disc (which is similar to a disc plow but has a bunch of smaller discs on, usually, 2 or more shafts) is used to run over the (very rough) plowed ground to break the clumps apart created by the plow. Often a harrow or just some old pieces of metal junk are towed behind the disc to really smooth out the ground. Often, this is done a few weeks after the plowing to allow rain and weather to even out the ground some before bouncing tractor and disc over the plowed ground.

A cultivator is something that has many skinny plows on springs that is towed behind the tractor to tear the dirt up to loosen it for planting. I have something called a "soil ripper" that I use on my little JD 4010 that fits this description. Modern ones can be bought from TSC or Agri Supply that do more or less the same thing. These are used on soil that has been previously plowed.

Farmers tend to be leaning towards use of things like cultivators rather than replowing, discing and harrowing every year like farmers did for years, as such uses a lot less fuel and man hour time to get a new crop in. This is basically what I do in my own veggie garden. After breaking it up with the Gravely rotary plow about 6 years ago, I just use the soil ripper now to till the soil before planting. I've a couple big discs that I mount on the soil ripper to each side of the cultivator plows now to maintain the raised rows that I made with the big discs. You can buy a rig called a Keulavator from Agri Supply that'll take big opposed discs for making very uniform raised rows similar to what I make with the discs mounted on my soil ripper bar.

Ralph

 

[bdog]

Some infor here http://www.wtamu.edu/%7Ecrobinson/TILLAGE/tillage.htm