Why are Velcourt not direct/zero drilling on a large scale?

[Spud]

A twin leg maidwell with a jd 8rx which has replaced a quad track

An 8rx to mole? Surely an ord County or a Magnum could do that? How extravagant!

 

[ajd132]

An 8rx to mole? Surely an ord County or a Magnum could do that? How extravagant!

It’s a twin leg, and it also pulls a 12m drill. Don’t think I would be very popular if I made someone mole 1000 acres this year with a county and single leg mole!

 

[Spud]

It’s a twin leg, and it also pulls a 12m drill. Don’t think I would be very popular if I made someone mole 1000 acres this year with a county and single leg mole!

Does the mole need 200hp/leg? Must be rum land

 

[ajd132]

Does the mole need 200hp/leg? Must be rum land

Yep. We do a lot through crops in the spring aswell so tired are a big no for that.

 

[puntabrava]

Heavy land here sees two wheats, cc, spring beans, two wheats, cc, spring oats.
Direct drill the breaks and the covers, occasionally wheat after beans. Flatlift combi the wheats.
Nowt half arsed about it.
Taking straw off & muck back creates traffic, which in a wet time can be a problem.
Beans need deep sowing so we use a Kockerling AT300 with a tine bar on the linkage.
Cc pre oats often Kockerling drilled too.
Oats need absolute minimum disturbance, which is where the Moore comes in. Moore also sows all the other cover crops (mostly pre roots)
Flatlift combi for the wheat just consistently works.
The next stage for us I think is strip til - which will reduce cost cultivating, eliminate the Kockerling and at least half the amount under the combi, thereby creating savings and capacity.
The Kockerling cost £3500 on this forum, originally bought to drill beans & covers.
Moore was bought new with a cps grant, and has since 2018 direct sown about 1400acres
Pottinger combi is brilliant and bought new to sow 500ac in 2015 - it now does about 400ac/yr
If necessary, all three can run together, and occasionally do. They are all very good at what they do, but no one is good at all situations.

How would you do it?

Put the elders in a care home out of management’s way, flog the rusting metal and buy 700 sucklers, tis the way forward. Think of all that soil health for the next generation.

 

[ajd132]

Heavy land here sees two wheats, cc, spring beans, two wheats, cc, spring oats.
Direct drill the breaks and the covers, occasionally wheat after beans. Flatlift combi the wheats.
Nowt half arsed about it.
Taking straw off & muck back creates traffic, which in a wet time can be a problem.
Beans need deep sowing so we use a Kockerling AT300 with a tine bar on the linkage.
Cc pre oats often Kockerling drilled too.
Oats need absolute minimum disturbance, which is where the Moore comes in. Moore also sows all the other cover crops (mostly pre roots)
Flatlift combi for the wheat just consistently works.
The next stage for us I think is strip til - which will reduce cost cultivating, eliminate the Kockerling and at least half the amount under the combi, thereby creating savings and capacity.
The Kockerling cost £3500 on this forum, originally bought to drill beans & covers.
Moore was bought new with a cps grant, and has since 2018 direct sown about 1400acres
Pottinger combi is brilliant and bought new to sow 500ac in 2015 - it now does about 400ac/yr
If necessary, all three can run together, and occasionally do. They are all very good at what they do, but no one is good at all situations.

How would you do it?

You grow roots so sounds sensible what you are doing. Not really comparable to us doing just combjneables.

 

[Spud]

You grow roots so sounds sensible what you are doing. Not really comparable to us doing just combjneables.

Don't grow roots on the heavy land.

The light is a mixture too though

Wheat after spuds or beans flatlift combi
Barley after beet or wheat plough combi
Beans, wb after s barley & cc direct drill
Ok increasingly moving towards less cultivation in root crops too

 

[Hindsight]

An 8rx to mole? Surely an ord County or a Magnum could do that? How extravagant!

Old Countys are hardly a cheap tractor these days iven there classic status! I thought you might suggest an old Track Marshall or Cat D5 Agric on the mole. Those were the days.

Having found a suitable clip on You Tube has reminded me of my youth and I can fully appreciate the draw of a R8X. Though today those ear defenders would be Dr Dre !!

 

[Fish]

Heavy land here sees two wheats, cc, spring beans, two wheats, cc, spring oats.
Direct drill the breaks and the covers, occasionally wheat after beans. Flatlift combi the wheats.
Nowt half arsed about it.
Taking straw off & muck back creates traffic, which in a wet time can be a problem.
Beans need deep sowing so we use a Kockerling AT300 with a tine bar on the linkage.
Cc pre oats often Kockerling drilled too.
Oats need absolute minimum disturbance, which is where the Moore comes in. Moore also sows all the other cover crops (mostly pre roots)
Flatlift combi for the wheat just consistently works.
The next stage for us I think is strip til - which will reduce cost cultivating, eliminate the Kockerling and at least half the amount under the combi, thereby creating savings and capacity.
The Kockerling cost £3500 on this forum, originally bought to drill beans & covers.
Moore was bought new with a cps grant, and has since 2018 direct sown about 1400acres
Pottinger combi is brilliant and bought new to sow 500ac in 2015 - it now does about 400ac/yr
If necessary, all three can run together, and occasionally do. They are all very good at what they do, but no one is good at all situations.

How would you do it?

Spud, I know you grow roots, so you do what you godda do, it is what it is.

On this farm all cash crops go through a combine and are no till, with out exception, including both beans and peas, on soil types ranging from m loam through to silty clay loam and most fields are under drained.
All straw is chopped apart from around 100 acres which go on a straw for muck deal.

When it comes to drilling, I have a choice, either a disc (750) or a tine (co 4), and that’s it, one or the other.
Over the years I’ve done the odd bit of low disturbance subsoiling (stupid term), only a few acres here and there, just to satisfy my own curiosity and I’ve never seen any difference between the no till and the other thing, just costs more, This year I’ve done about 7 acres in a 40 acre field of W barley, it looks greener now but I bet there’s no difference come harvest.

 

[Martin Holden]

Velcourt are a well respected organisation that offer a service to land owners. I have several friends who are former Velcourt managers. The prime directive is to make money for Velcourt and not necessarily for the client’s maximum advantage.
I suspect that with the ending of BPS, Velcourt will be forced to adopt Zero-till a lot more in future.

Well that’ll see them returning to the mid 70’s when I was a student worker for a couple of harvests. All they had were chisel ploughs and Bettison 3 D drills on the Cotswolds. How we they have to get the ploughs in after decade of DD as the Cotswold stones came to the surface!

 

[Two Tone]

Well that’ll see them returning to the mid 70’s when I was a student worker for a couple of harvests. All they had were chisel ploughs and Bettison 3 D drills on the Cotswolds. How we they have to get the ploughs in after decade of DD as the Cotswold stones came to the surface!

I remember them in Suffolk, ploughing then combi-drilling wheat in early August at about 85Kgs/ha in the mid 90’s.
They soon gave that up and on that farm, the owner took it back in hand and it has been Claydon drilling it ever since.
However, Velcourt are clever in trying and evaluating these techniques early, so that we can look over the hedge to see how well they work.
One thing they seem to do one hell of a lot of, is Spraying. I’ve several former farm manager friends that were bollocked if the sprayer was parked in the shed with its pump stopped!
They even had one of their directors flying round in a light aircraft. One of my friends still panics whenever he sees one now. This is why he gave up working for them!

I’ve got a block of very stony land here. Not Brash, but Banbury Ironstone. After being drilled twice with my Weaving GD with its angled discs, I haven’t noticed more stone on top yet. But it is probably because I don’t need to drill it so deep to get the seed covered with soil. But I’ll probably have to avoid growing Beans or Peas on that land.
In any argument between Banbury Ironstone and Steel, the stone always wins!

 

[snarling bee]

An 8rx to mole? Surely an ord County or a Magnum could do that? How extravagant!

We use a 485 quadtrac on a twin leg mole. Certainly wouldn't want any less grip even though we could probably get away with less power. 70 acres a day makes it a bearable job. 25 acres a day with a D5 and single leg is mind numbing to say the least.
The thing with a mole is that there is no option to lift up or pull out if you get a tough bit if you are going to do the job properly.

 

[yellow belly]

Twin leg moler takes out the wheel marks a single leg moled needs the wheelings taking out