New vertical tillage tools help combat crop residue
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Equipped with disks combined with fluted disks, harrows and rollers, they are designed to cut through the residue and create a sweet spot for seeds to germinate. They also help make ground more uniformly level
by MIKE MULHERN
The modern tillage toolbox is a mixture of the old and new with the latest vertical tillage tools designed to handle the growing problem of crop residue.
Jeff Barlow farms 4,500 acres of hard clay in the Binbrook area near Hamilton. He's been using a vertical tillage tool for the last four years to take on crop residue, to get onto the land early, to open hard ground for planting and to bust crusts that form over pre-emergent corn or soybean fields.
He no-till plants some acres and he also plows after wheat and goes in with harrows to set up his seedbed for corn, planted conventionally. His rotation is corn, then soy on soy, then winter wheat under-seeded with red clover, which he plows down in late fall.
"We use vertical tillage early in the spring on plowed ground because we can get in a little earlier with that equipment than we can with the traditional field cultivator," Barlow says, adding that getting to a field even two days early can make a difference in spring planting. "Sometimes," he says, "you get those two fields in and it rains for two weeks."
The new tillage tools manufacturers brought in to handle the problems of crop residue are called vertical tillage tools. The setup varies from manufacturer to manufacturer, but most have disks combined with fluted disks, harrows and rollers. They are designed to cut through the residue and create a sweet spot for seeds to germinate. They also depend on horsepower of five to 12 horsepower per foot along with tractor speeds in the seven to eight miles per hour range and all the way up to 10 or 12 miles per hour in wheat stubble.
Cost of the equipment can range from about $2,000 to $3,000 a foot, depending on the toolbar setup. Rising steel prices are expected to push those prices even higher.
Barlow also uses the Salford RTS vertical tillage tool to help with levelling on a rutted field or to cut through corn or soybean stalks ahead of planting. "If I have a lot of soybean residue that wasn't spread very well or it wasn't very good, I just go in and spread the residue," he says, adding that wheat emergence is a little more even if the residue is spread out.
Certified Crop Advisor and tillage expert Pat Lynch refers to changes in today's tillage as a revolution. "We had no-till in the late 1970s and through the '80s and into the '90s," Lynch says, "and then we changed tillage systems in the late '90s and now we're into a real tillage revolution."
Driving that revolution, he says, is a strengthening of secondary cell walls of corn plants, making them harder to cut and leading to more and tougher residue.
"A bunch of things changed in the late '90s," Lynch says, "and we're seeing it right now. The corn stalks changed dramatically with a very much higher concentration of lignin and a lot more dry matter in the corn stalks. So, now, we have got a lot of material we have to deal with in the springtime."
The lignin in tougher corn stalks was literally slashing tires of tractors and planters, Lynch says. "Farmers did what they did in the '70s. They started chopping the stalks."
Combine makers got on board and put stalk choppers right on the header. "They chop the stalks and that goes back onto the ground. And once that happens, you've got a real thick mat of material on the ground."
Difficult ground conditions after corn led to lower yields for no-till soybeans, but a solution soon showed itself.
"What happened," Lynch says, "is that we had a number of wet years when we rutted the fields in order to get the corn off, so the farmers had worked those headlands to get rid of the ruts and made a path to the other end of the field and back again. Then they noticed a big increase in soybean yields where they worked the ground, so now we have more farmers going to working the ground in the fall after corn stops. This is the most significant thing that has happened in tillage in a long time."
Jim Boak, national sales manager for Salford Farm Machinery, Salford, Ont. says they have been building their RTS (Residue Tillage Specialist) vertical tillage tool since 2003 and there have been a couple of upgrades since then.
"When we got away from the mouldboard plow and went to chisel plowing and disking for managing residue," Boak says, "we started to bury a lot of residue right in the seed zone, so we actually started planting more seed to account for the loss of some germination. Vertical tools improve the seedbed because they don't put residue down in that seed zone; they keep it above it."
One of the other benefits of vertical tillage is that ground surfaces become more uniformly level.
While Boak sees the benefits of vertical tillage, he also believes you need more than one tool and one pass to prepare a seedbed.
"The single pass idea is a wonderful dream," Boak says, "and even if we had all the money in the world, we still can never create one because Mother Nature isn't all that co-operative. Farmers who are trying to distill their whole product line down to one tool or one pass are shortchanging themselves, because you wouldn't buy tools unless they were meant to do certain functions like warming, drying, levelling, managing.
"The very idea of a manufacturer or farmer or dealer saying here's a one-pass tool, they should be taken out behind the barn and spanked," Boak says.
In fact, he says, Salford is seeing a rebound in the sale of plows. "It has to do with the fact that this residue is becoming such a large volume and such a high quality that it does not decompose rapidly enough, so we're going back to some of the old methods. And when you look at the economics of it, the economics are good for a mouldboard plow and an s-tine cultivator these days."
He says a number of producers consider it the most economical way to farm. Plow in the fall, make a pass (or two) with the cultivator in the spring and plant. BF