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W Texas | If you have the really heavy newer cotton pickers and strippers, tillage is the winter project after every harvest, no matter what. Same can probably be said for most newer/heavier grain equipment, but I don't do grain or silage.
In Arkansas I imagine you have a hard time limiting field activities to when it's dry. But if you can only get on the field when it is dry, it really limits the soil compaction. Also, lower the PSI in your tires as much as possible. Duals and bigger wheels/fatter tires also help.
I'm furrow irrigated raised bed, but in the desert. This is skip row furrow irrigated, so basically a 18" furrow with a 62" flat bed. 14 or 15" busters. We do our cotton with the tractor tires on top of the beds and really try to only get on dry ground. This is easier out here than in Arkansas, I am sure.
Cover crops or field crops, we are 100% tractor tires in the furrow. We run rear duals with 80" spacing. Looks weird but it evens the compaction in each furrow, so the water flows down the furrow at a similar rate. Otherwise, the compacted furrows go fast and the uncompacted furrows go slow. This isn't really cover crops, but rotation crops, such as graze out wheat/barley/triticale. We did alfalfa this way a long time ago and after a few years our furrows were wrecked, but the crop itself was phenomenal. (We have to bust out our furrows every few irrigations or they tend to silt in.) We didn't have RTK at that time. Intend to put some alfalfa back in using this system. With RTK, should be able to keep the furrows clean and straight and beds in shape for years (I hope.)
The Australians apparently do quite a bit of furrow irrigated skip row raised bed for years at a time without tillage and can rotate between row and field crops without problem. Their literature emphasizes the need to stay off the beds and keep the tires in the furrows.
I THINK if we got out of cotton and went with grazing and small square bale haying (would be 3 tie bales out here), using smaller equipment would allow us to do forage crops no-till from now to kingdom come.
FWIW, I find that after tillage with a newly formed bed, water has difficulty soaking across the bed, but after the soil settles down and is irrigated the first time (or rained on if you are somewhere other than here), the second irrigation easily "subs up" all the way across the beds. This is in tight silty clay and clay soils that are probably fairly similar to your rice soils. We do 1/2 mile runs and 12 hour sets with around 40 gpm/row. | |
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Cover crops with irrigation and beds
