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Thumb of Michigan | We began converting from conventional till/ minimum till to no till before the in line ripper things were invented. We did do some ripping with v rippers before we converted all the ground. I question the value of needing a lot of shattering action after running (and giving up on) those tools being of any value to us. Shattering the soil profile may sound sexy I guess, but there can be a lot of collateral damage as well due to shattering.
BUT- after a few years, we did notice that some previously compacted soil wasn't fixing itself as fast as we'd like. Generally speaking, it wasn't what we consider out best soils that were struggling. It was the sand and gravel stuff. The sand in particular was a real challenge. Felt we needed to do something to address the problem. In our case, we ran an inline ripper in the fall as close to where we wanted to plant the next year. Never waited for the conditions to be "dry". Dry and Fall aren't synonymous very often here anyway. We'd run when it was what I'll call moist, not wet.
We did have a part of a rented farm that was extremely troubling to manage. It had a sandier A horizon with a fairly deep gravelly B horizon. It was in part a headland, and had a lot of traffic. Owner had also allowed municipal sludge to be applied a couple of times before we started farming it. That created a number of issues, compaction being one of them. We put the farm into winter wheat, addressed some fertility issues, and brought in an inline ripper. We made a pass perpendicular to the direction of the rows, and then parallel to the direction of planting after harvest in July. Again, not at all trying to shatter anything, just needed some slots in the B horizon. We then seeded some Oilseed Radish with a drill. Seeding was late July. Hate to use terms like "cured the problem", but we cured the problem for quite a few years after. We only ripped in the area where we felt we had issues, we didn't do anything on the rest of the farm other than we seeded radish on the entire farm. And, we experienced our first issue we'd ever had with tile plugging due to the radish that year as well. That was across the field on a lower corner of nice loamy soil. Chalked that up to experience, certainly didn't dampen our enthusiasm for OSR as a cover or any other cover for that matter. | |
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? For no tillers
