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| I always use the vertical tillage in spring, but last year I did experience the same thing as you mentioned. I had a field that I recently picked up that was very ruff and had lots of badger holes, mounds, and ridges threw out the field. Soon as we were done combining corn the fall of 2016 I went out and hit this field twice to try and smooth and level. There was plenty of moisture in the dirt while disking (probably the reason it set up so hard), we had lots of snow that winter and then came the dry spring. That field was like you said, very hard and the top couple inches were dry and made a horrible seed bed. This field was a ways away from home so I seeded it as best I could, and hoped for rain, but that was my poorest yielding field last year, maybe 20 bushel.
As with any system, there is nothing that is fool proof, and after that experience I will not be doing any other fall tillage with that piece of equipment. I will say that we don't use that much fuel, I have learned with the high speed disks that you don't work very deep, but you want to use speed to get things moving. I set less than 2" deep and go about 10 mph, now it does take power to pull that fast but we cover 2 acres per gallon of fuel and are covering around 45 acres per hour.
I will say that I was nervous last spring when it wasn't raining, that my fields were going to dry out and that I possible might have trouble getting seed to even germinate. But when I went in to plant, the top 1" was loose, dry dirt, then after that the soil had good moisture and the beans came perfect, and in my area the first week of June is when we received our first 1/2 inch of rain. I also remember NO-TILLING in dry springs where the ground would open up and have cracks 3-4 inches deep with the top 2 inches of dirt dry and hard. Then when trying to seed with a 1890 drill it would open ground up and then dry dirt would fall directly on top of the seed. I was very confident with vertical tillage on good years with rain but didn't know how it would do in a dry spring like we had last year, but it ended up working very well.
Edit: I re did the math and fuel consumption would be closer to 1/2 gal./acre
Edited by Whats Up 3/27/2018 09:41
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Vertical till and soil health
