Conservation Agriculture {CA}.....no more ploughs or ploughing

Seeing as this thread is on the topic of conservation agriculture, I though I could share what I'm doing for my studies at the moment. I am a masters student and I admit I am not a farmer nor am I from an agricultural background so I will not know as much as all of you, but I have always been interested in agriculture and became interested in different practices during my plant biology degree.
So I decided for my masters thesis to investigate what influences farmers to use conservation agriculture or not and whether it is likely to become more widespread in current and changing conditions. If any of you would be interested in helping my study or just have a bit of time to spare, I would really appreciate you filling out a 15 min survey: www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/farmerdecisions Thanks you! (p.s. if I'm not allowed to post things like this just let me know or delete it)

Did the survey. Slight error in it where it says very difficult at both ends of one of the questions.

Conservation agriculture is one of those nice ideas that seems to run up against real life problems like slumping and ponding of heavy soils, infestations of slugs, and a build up of certain weeds that love zero till, like sterile brome, and problems dealing with thick wet mats of chopped residue like barley straw. I keep dabbling in it though and one day it might even work. Good luck with the thesis.

Having now waded properly through this thread rather than just reading the last post above, I'll add my two pen'orth.

The other day, as I added about half tonne of weight to the front of my tractor before hanging a tonne of fert on the back, all on top of the tractor which weighs about 5 tonnes, I did consider this to be quite a mad way of carrying a tonne of fertiliser across a soft wet field.

We are so blinkered by the traditional layout of the tractor, which is essentially a horse with wheels, that we have lost sight of what we are actually trying to achieve.

I think that Batemans sprayer with detachable skid unit which could be replaced by a fert spreader did a lot to address this issue and I think it should have caught in more widely.

Many more implements would benefit from better weight distribution and lower weight if they were self propelled without a doubt.

I can't t possibly read all this thread but it's nearly convinced me I NEED a trantor!

ARW said:

I can't t possibly read all this thread but it's nearly convinced me I NEED a trantor!

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fastrac would be fine as a pocket rocket ...trouble is they seem to be built for heavy draught work as a priority