Tiller Tiller Vs Discs

[johnk]

I would like to know the advantage a tiller has over discs? You can do 10X the work with the discs as the tiller and don't have to worry about shear pins etc. Once it's turned with a bottom plow and the soil is half dry the discs do a great job. Whats the tillers' advantage on a 1/2 acre or acre plot??

 

[johnk]

A pic of the plot after using the discs.

 

[art]

The disc harrows farmers use normally weigh in at about 300 to 400 lbs per ft of cut, how much disc can your tractor lift? This means you have to keep driving over compacting more. A tiller will dig 6 to 8" down often with the very first pass giving you a quality seed bed for faster germination and root growth.

 

[johnk]

I only made two passes over the same area and was satisfied with the job. I forgot to mention there are many soft ball and bigger sized rocks that rear havoc on a tiller. My buddy up the road tried tilling his plot and kept bending tines and busting shear pins. I can see the advantage of a tiller under ideal soilconditions but in this case I think it is the only alternative. Also what would be a sensible size of the plot with a 5" tiller?? A few pics of my tractor and the work it has done for me can be seen on my website if interested... Thanks for any more info I can get....

John

http://users.adelphia.net/~gizmo/

 

[RonR]

If I had a lot of wide open space I wanted to work up, I'd consider a disc. My experience is that you have to have some speed up to make a disc work well.

With city lots being smaller, I don't think it would work as well as a tiller. With a tiller, you can go at a slow ground speed.

That's my story, anyway......

Ron

 

[Rimmer]

"Once it's turned with a bottom plow..."

That may be your answer, to some extent at least.

I would suspect that a lot of CUT and SubCUT owners don't have much (or any) experience with plowing, and may not work enough ground to make it worth learning. (My neighbor puts in a pretty good size truck patch with this Ford 3000, and he says that every year by the time he gets back in the swing of it and gets the plow adjusted, he's almost done. He's no "city kid," he farmed about 40 acres for years.)

I think that many of the CUTs and SubCuts are not well suited for plowing. They don't have draft control, aren't heavy enough, etc. That's not a criticism, it's just that they are designed to excel at other tasks.

Finally, even if you did plow with a modern CUT, can you handle (as Art suggested) a disk that is heavy enough to do a good job?

So, given a machine that is designed to do a good job with a tiller, you put a tiller on it and away you go!

Just my random thoughts here just before bed time...

/forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif

 

[Alan L.]

I have a 6.5 disk harrow that I bought at TSC. It does not do as good a job as a tiller. However, I am using it to do 3 or 4 acres at a time. A tiller is just way too slow for that. After 2 or 3 passes, going as fast as the tractor will go in medium range, the ground is broken up pretty well, but only 3 or 4 inches in reality. So far I've had good luck with my grass planting doing this way.

If I had under an acred to do, I'd use a tiller.

 

[johnk]

I did a good job withh my CUT. It served me well for what I am using it. Not the biggest tractor or the biggest discs just having fun. I may have the biggisest woodchucks around but nI sure like seeing the green stuff grow and getting some eats out of the final product..