Power harrow

[warksfarmer]

The trouble with precision like that is that you cannot go wide or fast. It would take forever to cover a twenty acre field and you would miss some anyway. If you go fractionally deeper you will just relocate small plants and fractionally shallower and to will miss. Killing pants by surface cultivation is a very poor system especially in a wet year such as this, I can remember ineffectively chasing small BG plants round and round for days when glyphosate was expensive.

I'm not sure I agree with this. If you get a flush of weeds and then cultivate to remove them from their rooting then that weed is dead as it won't regerminate from that same seed. I've seen first hand somebody getting on top of Blackgrass with repeated light cultivations. Roughly halved numbers in 5 years whilst sticking with the same chemical approach.

There's also a guy running a weaving tined drill who has gone from 400 seeds/m2 to 4 using the same approach of multiple passes prior to actually drilling a cash crop.

 

[Billboy1]

Been using a power harrow to level some rutted tramlines up so at the same time tried it direct into some stubble at 1inch deep to see what it did as a weed hitting tool and it's done a fantastic job. Ran it at 10km/hr which was using 8.5l/ha fuel so around £2.70/ha. The power harrow itself is 20 years old so other than blades has negligible running costs. With the tractor and man all in it's about £11/ha and only lacking proper consolidation which could easily be remedied by towing an old Cambridge rolls from the nettles. It wasn't smashing the soil to pieces due to the forward speed so what's not to like?

Any disc/press machines are silly money unless you import direct but your still looking at about £10k for 6m and they are only doing a similar job to the power harrow if run like we've tried.

Any opinions?

How deep to level tramlines why not deep tine down each wheel mark or is that not allowed?

 

[warksfarmer]

How deep to level tramlines why not deep tine down each wheel mark or is that not allowed?

Deep tine is the last thing you need as the next year they will be even deeper as your loosening them. They just need levelling out in places not everywhere. It's just knocking the shoulder off them really but leaving the hard established base as they stay in the same place every year.

 

[Billboy1]

Got you . I need bit more than a power harrow to level some of my trenches

 

[mo!]

Got you . I need bit more than a power harrow to level some of my trenches

I did ours following the tramlines first, then at an angle to drag soil in. If they are that bad then maybe at opposite angles with time between passes to settle. It's probably too late now though.

 

[warksfarmer]

Got you . I need bit more than a power harrow to level some of my trenches

Just use it twice!

 

[Billboy1]

I need to avoid them in the 1st place it's a tyre thing in my case need to go abit wider this time of year currently 16.9 on mounted sprayer