clueless about cropping

[Bootneck]

I'm an organic livestock farmer, pretty simple system, all permanent pasture, never grown any crops or even reseeded, never went to ag college, not much arable where I am so my knowledge of growing crops is 0. Now I want to have a go on a very small scale, just for interest, maybe an acre to start with. Sweetcorn, vegetables, sunflowers, whatever. I've a little 47 hp loader tractor, a single furrow reversible plough from a farm sale, that's it so far. What else do I need to get started? A cultivator? Rotavator?
Any advice welcome.

 

[averageguy54]

Before you start, get a soil test done. Find out if the plot wants limed and exactly what the nutrient levels are. Without proper liming and muck spreading you'll be wasting your time. A way to spread muck would be an idea, doing it with a wheelbarrow and fork will be a good days work on an acre. I would suggest a rotavator would be the best 2nd implement. You could go with other things like a disc harrow or cultivators but when you look at smaller organic gardens, virtually all of then use a small rotavator to do their work and it will usually be a one pass operation. Discs and cutivators will likely require multiple passes to get a good seed bed.
You'll want something to row up with, by hand with a hoe is very tedious and back breaking. Over here they home make "hillers" using old discs. You should also give serious though to some form of mulching, to maintain moisture retention. If the commercial ground covers are out of budget, then there are lots of alternatives, ,straw, grass clippings(which add nitrogen as they rot), newspaper to name a few.Anything that will slow down weeds from growing.

 

[Bootneck]

OK that sounds good. It's more of the machinery side I'm unsure of, Ive grown vegetables in the garden so have a basic knowledge about fertility, pH etc, it's just the scaling up that is a bit daunting. Looking at small (1.5 m ish) rotavators online there is a wide variation in price.

 

[averageguy54]

You'll get what you pay for when it comes to rotavators. Can't say what you have over there, but here a lot of tractor size ones come from Italy. They rarely come up for sale used and when they do, they're not cheap. I also rarely see anyone complaining about them. They go for about $1500CAD here as used.
Over here most garden and arable tillage is done with a plough, followed by 2 or 3 trips with a disc harrow and then maybe another spring tooth harrow to fine tune the seed bed. Then it still gets gone over with a hiller . A lot of unnecessary tillage in my opinion, which will allow for potential soil compaction and degradation of soil structure.
What could be useful is what we call a cultivater. It hooks on the 3ph and has a combination of hiller wheels and spring teeth. You can use it to make your rows and also run through the garden in the growing season to reduce weed growth and maintain or even increase the size of your hill rows( think potatoes).
If you are going to use chicken muck, which gardens love, it needs to be outdoors in the weather for about a month before you plant, else it will burn the seed. Pig muck is not so bad and plants love it too.

 

[renewablejohn]

If your used to growing Veg by the deep bed method than a 4ft wide rotavator and fergi ridger is very handy. If you take the middle ridger off and put on an angled scaffold board it makes a simple deep bed former of the right width to weed from the tram lines. If you get a 2nd ridger and ridge roller then deep rooted crops like carrots and parsnips are easy to grow.