Oswald No-Till Farm Cleghorn, IA | I hope this post is not taken as a "tillage bashing" post as that isn't my intent.
From various experiences over 40 years in a tractor seat, I think the two most fascinating tillage tools to operate or watch are the in-line rippers (paraplows included) and the moldboard plow. At a ride and drive, I operated an in-line and found that "wave" quite something to watch. I haven't operated a moldboard in over a decade but still find them interesting.
Your post really is about the unintended consequences of tillage. Seldom do farmers discuss the negatives of the system they are using. Those issues are things that you learn to live with. Full width tillage has negatives. "No-till" has negatives. Negatives are just a part of farming.
For us, the key problem we discovered in our "ripping" phase was the lack of load bearing ability and wheel track recompaction which then lead us to rip again to remove the tracks. It was a treadmill. This dry fall around here has allowed a lot of tillage tools to shatter the soil. Sometimes that shattering causes powder, sometimes basketballs.
By this time next year some will be talking about how bottomless the fields became and some will be talking about how much greater the yield was from the tillage investment. Hopefully, your tillage investment will pay off with enhanced knowledge about the practice.
Best of luck and don't break the tractor "learning". |
Can you go too deep with a inline ripper?
