"Improving Our Lot" - Planned Holistic Grazing, for starters..
- Thread starter Kiwi Pete
- Start date
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
The only other Aitchison drill I've used was a 2.7m grassfarmer drill and although not "heavy" the weight was a long way out the back, or so it seemed, it made the tractor bloody awful to drive down the road to the other farm
I doubt it would be half the weight of this one but most farmer tractors here have a loader and no front weights (mine included) so that doesn't help
I only had it on demo for a day, would have been on a MF 6160 back then I think, it played with it with no weights or loader, use to run the strip seeder on the same tractor or a previous one of the same size with no front weights and go some silly places with it and it was fine, that was 2.5m a d weighed a ton empty iirc
- Location
- Owaka, New Zealand
Even quite deepBb
Boys soil
And quite damp, deep; and dark down deep
Broken-off-just-below-ground-level-strainer-posts suck.... but I got it out
- Location
- Cornwall
All our grass is direct drilled/over sown with an Aitchison. Pretty sure it’s been on the back of our 7740 before so can’t be that heavy. I’d always seen it as one of the lighter machines to be fair. I like the Duncan units. Did a fair bit with them in SA and they always leave a nice finish with little disturbance.
deep boys soil
is Duncan a tine drill ?
I often wish I had bought an Aitchison when I tried one and carried on with the job when the strip seeder went as it was a simple bit of kit and it wasn't a bad job to do
- Location
- Cornwall
They do tine and disc drills of various shapes and sizes, with all sorts of optional extras for all sorts of situations.
Giltrap / Home
www.duncanag.co.nz
Mine is 3metres and weighs 1.4 tonne. Not stupid heavy but far back like you say. Tractor knows it's there it's a Massey 5460 about 115hp and about 4tonne. Tractor pulls it fine through anything even putting cereals quite deep but have to be careful where I turn round with it up in the air
- Location
- Cornwall
They do tine and disc drills of various shapes and sizes, with all sorts of optional extras for all sorts of situations.
Giltrap / Home
Further to that, we did a load of reseeding for a big racing stable in the Barossa and used a Duncan Vineyard Seeder (bout 2/3 down the list in that link). Only 1.8m wide but it did a beautiful job. That’s a double disc opener so very low disturbance. In fact there was so little ground disturbance you had to really look for the drill rows once he’d finished. And only needed a small tractor too, so it tiptoed across the ground.
- Location
- Quebec, Canada
If you didn’t have the humates would you consider molasses or beer?( for the plants)Just to scorch things a little - acetic acid
I made a fair bit of homebrew ACV a few years ago and we ran about 120 litres thru a mate's still to concentrate it up - it's the secret ingredient in my gorse spray
No secret now..... however just to give the thistles a bit of a burn, I am putting an extra bit on, I had a play with various things in these paddocks last year and salt definitely seems to cause cell burst in lignified plant material
So we help the salt into the plant and not into the soil by:
1 aiming for 100+ groundcover
Leaving plenty of green and brown grass with the woolly strippers, to soak it upView attachment 853418View attachment 853419
Then we'll aid uptake into the leaf/stem by tank-mixing humates and seaweed/fish goop that the plants want. I'm really keen to see what happens with the humate as I've not used it before.
It tastes like salty coal juice, I took 100mm in a cup.
Shame it'll sizzle the plants tops, however it shouldn't even get to the root as we are only giving it a whiff of salty acid, so the grass will still regenerate before too long - just stall it a month (hence the goodies for the soil)
The clover, being relatively stripped out by the lambs, should be left fairly intact and regen faster than the thistles/grasses, which I expect will just crumple down onto the surface after another run-over with the sheeps as I drill it.
That's the perfect plan, now let's see what goes wrong.
JohnGalway
Member
- Location
- Connemara, Ireland
1.8km polypipe to water "some" paddocks I'll make. Will need more, but didn't fancy selling any organs yet.
250m 110mm drainage pipe, will cut it to 1.2m lengths, cut up some 5ft split posts into 3 or 4 improvised tree stakes. 2x tree stakes to a pipe, held together with cable ties (don't mention all that on the plastic thread ?). Gonna plant around 200 trees, Alder, Downy Birch, Willows, Crab Apples mostly for shelter, but also biodiversity and making some biochar in the future. I hope to pollard them eventually all going well. Very challenging site for them.
Lidls finest sds hammer drill (pretty decent tbh) making post holes for temporary electric posts. This part of the farm we believe used the Rundale system long ago, so has oh maybe seventeen billion non stock proof single stone walls. Puzzled me a while how to integrate paddocks... until I got me an sds drill. Reckon I'm the only farmer who needs to use grease with step in posts ?
Forked up some handy seaweed from the shore. Storm Brendan came the next day and reclaimed 50% of it.... Landspread the remainder, ordered a "ballbarrow" to make this job easier. I'm very lucky in this particular spot as very little plastic in the weed, some places it would be too much work sorting the plastic rubbish out of the weed itself to bother with it. We're really f**king every part of the planet pretty good.
250m 110mm drainage pipe, will cut it to 1.2m lengths, cut up some 5ft split posts into 3 or 4 improvised tree stakes. 2x tree stakes to a pipe, held together with cable ties (don't mention all that on the plastic thread ?). Gonna plant around 200 trees, Alder, Downy Birch, Willows, Crab Apples mostly for shelter, but also biodiversity and making some biochar in the future. I hope to pollard them eventually all going well. Very challenging site for them.
Lidls finest sds hammer drill (pretty decent tbh) making post holes for temporary electric posts. This part of the farm we believe used the Rundale system long ago, so has oh maybe seventeen billion non stock proof single stone walls. Puzzled me a while how to integrate paddocks... until I got me an sds drill. Reckon I'm the only farmer who needs to use grease with step in posts ?
Forked up some handy seaweed from the shore. Storm Brendan came the next day and reclaimed 50% of it.... Landspread the remainder, ordered a "ballbarrow" to make this job easier. I'm very lucky in this particular spot as very little plastic in the weed, some places it would be too much work sorting the plastic rubbish out of the weed itself to bother with it. We're really f**king every part of the planet pretty good.
- Location
- Derbyshire
Saw that pile of water pipe and thought I was in the classified section. Was about to put an offer in for it as a 'job lot'
You've got a cracking project ahead of you. Plenty of pictures please.
JohnGalway
Member
- Location
- Connemara, Ireland
Saw that pile of water pipe and thought I was in the classified section. Was about to put an offer in for it as a 'job lot'
You've got a cracking project ahead of you. Plenty of pictures please.
If there's pictures, it's going well. If there's none, it's not ?
I'm missing critical elements, cattle, and the ability to get round bales to this land. They'll come in time but until then I figure it's going to remain overgrazed a while ?
- Location
- Ardrossan Ayrshire
Whats the rundale system?
JohnGalway
Member
- Location
- Connemara, Ireland
Good question, I was promised more info on it by a knowledgeable person but it never came through unfortunately. I've had to use Dr Google since
Rundale - Wikipedia
- Location
- Ardrossan Ayrshire
Thank you. It says its the same type of thing as runrig.Good question, I was promised more info on it by a knowledgeable person but it never came through unfortunately. I've had to use Dr Google since
Rundale - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
- Location
- West Yorkshire
Made me chuckle this did ???
Where did you get the water pipe from and price if possible please.