Farmwithjunk
Super Member
There's more'n one way to skin a cat..... You're correct in your thinking about loosening the ground before tilling. Hitting a rock in loose soil SHOULD be less abusive than hitting the same rock buried in solid, virgin soil. Now....How you go about breaking up the soil is open to several options. If you have the HP/traction, a chisel plow would do the job AND would help bring rocks to the surface. A field cultivator will do much the same, but in broad, general terms, field cultivators are lighter in construction than a chisel plow, not lending themselves to breaking virgin soils. Subsoilers/middlebusters will acheive much the same results as a chisel plow, but on a smaller scale. Single shank subsoilers won't "rake" rocks out of the ground like a multi-shank chisel plow though. Something else that needs to be considered is SIZE of the rocks. Smaller (baseball to football size) rocks, I'd moldboard plow, pick up rocks, run through it with a field cultivator, pick rocks again, THEN till S.L.O.W.L.Y. at a shallow depth, pick up rocks once more, till at full depth, and then one final rock picking.
