Cultipress/unipress

We bought a 4.2m unipress a couple of weeks ago 2nd hand. Main intentions are to use it where we don't furrow press when ploughing, i.e headlands, smaller fields or those futher from the farm. So far on a range of soils its done a fantastic job, even heavy slabby clay, breaks down furrows, levels and leaves a weatherproof finish that we can leave till mid/late September and then either unipress again or powerharrow heavier bits to get a seedbed. Our weaving tine drill needs the seedbed made before it drills into it. We may also look into changing the drill soonish to something with some cultivation so we would plough and unipress asap after harvest and then with a month or so of weathering it could be drilled straight into without needing another pass from anything. It just gives us one more v useful option in our tillage armoury and so far I am v impressed. As said above the type of tines ( v heavy duty sprung tines) plus paddles and the DD ring press are a superb combination. If you pick the right timing after ploughing so that its hazeled for a few hours or so it makes a cracking job, to early and it can smear a bit, to late and clods can dry to much for it to deal with. Also tried it into some stubble to get a tilth for a cover crop which worked v well too, just cultivated the top 2 inches or so and pressed it down leaving a nice bit of soil to drill into. This might not work so well in either a v wet year, or a v dry year with baked out soil but this year its worked a treat. Also v well built and lots of weight to it. Quite enjoy using it really.

First pass on some sticky heavy clay that had dried out after being rolled which had hardly made any impression.