Never Heard of No Till...

[Drawbar]

Well apparently this farmer never heard of No-Till Farming, but I bet he sure wishes he had now. That just plain looks expensive. ;D ;D ;D

http://www.railroadmachinist.com/sitebuilder/images/another_bad_day-600x450.jpg

[MooseToo]

suppose he could blame it on his gps unit ?

[DaleK]

Fell asleep with his autosteer on would be my bet.

Drawbar, that looks like no-till to me. At least the prairie version, looks like he was seeding into soybean or some other stubble.

[Drawbar]

It looked to me like he was injecting anhydrous ammonia into the ground just ahead of the disc harrow, but I could be wrong. If that is what he is doing, then we always called that Minimum-Till, but you have to remember I live in Maine and the fields are a lot smaller and all we are planting is Corn and grass for the dairy cows and don't even use anhydrous ammonia.

We had some guys around here that did No-Till and it just does not work on our soil. We have gravely-Loam which packs very easily, and with the equipment we got (big for the standard sizes around here) just compacts it,and within a few years nothing will grow.

Minimum-Till works for us though.

[Drawbar]

As for falling asleep, I have done that wayyy too many times. When we used to get ready for planting, we would disc 24/7 and at 3 AM it gets kind of hard to stay awake. I would stop and run around the tractor 3-4 times just to wake myself up and then go at it again. Those new cabs don't help...quiet, comfortable, etc, etc, etc

[DaleK]

Nope. It's an air seeder. The cart has seed and (sometimes) fertilizer in it, gets blown back to the seeder at the back. Can't tell from the picture whether it's a cultivator with the seed dropping behind the shanks or has openers on it for the seed but he's definitely direct seeding. Some of them are 120' wide now.

That's why I always cultivate the outside round first, that way when I hit it going crosswise the extra bumping wakes me up.

[DaleK]

Looks like a Flexicoil cart. Had a picture here of one setup but I can't find it right now, it was a guy in Alberta running a 500ish bushel Flexicoil cart with a seeder behind it, 30' wagon behind that with 2 2000 gallon tanks on it, one for herbicide and one for liquid starter, and an NH3 tank behind THAT. Everything in one pass as long as you don't have to back out of a wet spot.

[DaleK]

Something for ya drawbar. Resolution kinda sucks. First is my no-till drill, seeding winter wheat into soybean stubble. Foreground is just planted. Can't see it but the combine is combining soybeans off to the left in the same field, I'm about 90 minutes behind him.

http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m34/dalek2/drill.jpg

Second is my no-till planter although we mostly use it for tilled ground. Don't usually have it on the big tractor, usually the 7510 from the first picture. This was first thing in the spring, it's pretty muddy now.

http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m34/dalek2/planter.jpg

[DaleK]

More no-till wheat. I'm actually caught up with the combine at this point, the standing beans are just to the left of the drill.

http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m34/dalek2/night.jpg

[Drawbar]

My bad...my bad...

We can't do no-till here. We have tried it, but the ground gets to hard and the yields drop off after just a year or so. We do minimal-till though,which means less tillage before planting.

Thanks for the explanation though. I call myself a farmer, but what we do is vastly different then what they do in the plains. No seed drilling here, as we don't grow grain,just hay and corn. But I did smile onetime when a prairie farmer saw one of our fields and asked how we farmed it without flipping the tractor over.

We farm some very, very hilly terrain.

[DaleK]

I hear ya. We have hills that can only be combined downhill because the combine can't make it up without sliding back down.