All right, there you are with acres of land, a tractor and plough. What do you do? Plough, obviously. But how and where? Hold ON! We got you covered. Read through to uncover every detail regarding your Disc Plough equipment and how to use it precisely.
Conventionally, we dig up the soil and turn it over to keep the topsoil darker, richer, and moist. Moreover, ploughing breaks up the clods of the earth and improves aeration.
After the digging and cold-breaking, the ground gets loose and crumbly. This, however, isn’t just enough. So, rake the soil back and forth until all the particles get very small.
The top soil, especially in the vegetable garden, should have a particle size of a dime or less.
Tip: Don’t tamp the ground perfectly smooth, or water penetration will be affected. Instead, leave rake furrows to aid in drainage.
All this is good for a small vegetable or a fruit farm. But think in terms of large acreage! Well, there is a solution to this backbreaking problem — a disc plough!
Types of Plows and Harrows
There is an array of auxiliary equipment for your tractor. The first thing to remember in buying equipment is that whatever you get must be compatible with your tractor.
If you have a small, older tractor, it won’t be good to get a five-bottom plough unless you enjoy sitting with your tractor. Although, most equipment will have a tractor hookup compatible with your tractor.
Ploughs are of two major types, trailer and mounted ploughs… the latter, as its name implies, comes mounted on the tractor.
The trailer plough is preferred anyhow, as it does a better job. But, on the other side, a mounted plough is easier to manoeuvre if you’re tossing for it.
Moreover, disc ploughs are effective on heavy clay soils but expensive unless you work with two or three hundred acres or more.
Harrow is another supersized spading fork with a streamlined rake. Harrow ploughs come in two main types, spring-tooth and disc. However, it is more expensive and more demanding in terms of maintenance. However, these drawbacks are compensated by its versatility.
Moreover, a disc plough might suffice for a good job in your field; you’ll have to go over the same area multiple times using a spring-tooth plough. Then, the discs cut up the stalks and bury them. A spring-tooth plough run over this kind of field would jam up.
Working Your Fields: Preparing, Ploughing & Harrowing
Preparing
The ground should not be too moist or dry the day you plough. The furrows get hard, like rock pillars and soil granulation, if it’s too wet. Layer, it will break down, reducing soil efficiency.
If it’s too dry and hard, it won’t get the plough in the ground, and if you manage to, the soil will break into clods while the plough skips around.
Ploughing
The time for ploughing can be learned only by looking at and feeling the soil. However, the old hands at it know when it’s just right, so plough when you see your neighbours revving up their tractors.
The standard ploughing practice involves turning the soil repeatedly. That’s the way it’s done in most areas. However, disc ploughing avoids the problem of chopping up the trash and half-burying it.
Harrowing
For ploughing, fields are divided into two sections: lands and headlands. The headlands are narrow strips about fifteen feet wide, which you leave unplowed as turn-around areas. The lands are what you plough first.
So you’ve ploughed one furrow and managed to turn around. Which side of the furrow would you go down?
If you go through the right-hand side — remember, a plough is right-handed — you’ll scoop more soil, leaving deeper trenches down the field.
Since you build trenches but plough a field, how about going down the left-hand side? But then you’d be scooping soil up against the first furrow and end up with a ridge down the centre of the field. Surely you don’t appreciate a ridge, either. So, in this case, opt for the ridge.
After you have gone over the field twice and constructed the back furrow, you always keep the left of the previous furrow. In other words, you’re ploughing up the field, crossing the headland, and ploughing down to the other headland in an ever-widening parallelogram.
If you have large farmland, you’ll end up with a ditch between them that would have been down the centre of the field. This ditch is called a dead furrow. The difference you’ve made by turning right while ploughing is that you only end up with a dead furrow between the lands. If you ploughed a whole field making left turns, you’d have nothing but dead furrows.
Remember, the plough is always a righty. Once the land is cultivated, you go across the headlands and make furrows at right angles.
