Tools of the Trade: What Equipment is Needed for Your Cropping Program to Become More Sustainable?

Profile Picture of Post's Author Bill Powel-Smith | Posted April 24, 2023

You can, in most situations, begin down the road to less tillage and green covers with the tools you have and a cutting torch. There are three main equipment categories to conventional tillage: deep tillage, vertical tillage and finishing tillage. Deep tillage tools break up soil down at 12-16 inches. Vertical tillage will bust up dirt clumps in the top 6 inches. Finishing equipment is designed to turn the soil surface into a beautiful, smooth fine powder ready for planting. Interestingly enough, the more we break apart the soil with tools like plow point sweeps, chisel cover boards and offset mixing disks, we actually help re-compact the soil. Consider how pottery is made: with clay powder, water and heat. Tight farming soils are made with fine particles (made with aggressive tillage), rain and heat (which happens with bare exposed soil). Addressing soil structure is the first premise of farming more sustainably. Soil structure affects water run-off, water holding capacity, crop root development, fertilizer uptake and weed pressure to name just a few factors.

Let’s begin with deep tillage tools. Moldboard plows, chisel plows and sweeps on rippers break the soil into fine particles deep in the soil, creating compaction zones that can be so deep they are almost out of reach to fix. If you do deep tillage, you have compaction, even in sand. The better strategy for deep tillage is to fracture the soil instead of breaking the soil. A great deep tillage tool is a ripper with a fine point and no sweep or cover board. If you have sweeps, cut the wings off or replace them with a narrow point. If your shanks are curved, replace them with vertical shanks. When the soil is moist but not wet or powder dry, rip your fields. Even better to rip your fields just ahead of planting a deep-rooted cover crop like rye. Plant roots will find the cracks from the ripper and keep the pores open your ripper created. A properly set up ripper will leave fine lines in the field with little or no heaving or surface disturbance. Between the shanks the ground will be firm and appear untouched. However, it will be riddled with hairline fractures that allow roots, air and water to move through the soil profile. The land will breathe a sigh of relief. Your goal with ripping is to break up compaction and hard pan. If you follow up with keeping a continuous cover of living roots on these ripped fields, you will rarely need to go back again and rip them.

On to vertical tillage, the tools of mass destruction. Most deep tillage tools break the soil into blocks and chunks that need horsepower to pull the many rows of fluted, curved or spiked discs designed to reduce the soil into more manageable pieces. If any sense of soil structure with pore space, worm holes and water holding capacity existed after the deep tillage, vertical tillage will remove all traces of any of it. And so, the true compaction begins. Let’s be fair; if you have trash from corn or bean or wheat, vertical tillage tools do a great job of incorporating that back into the soil. If you have a heavy green cover crop and your planter and your management is not ready to plant green, vertical tillage tools get that field ready for planting. Most manure application equipment requires some vertical tillage work after to level the field again. The take home message here is to understand how destructive vertical tillage is to your soil. Use vertical tillage lightly. Develop a strategy that reduces your need for vertical tillage: like applying manure on the surface to a green cover crop, or using a fine point ripper that doesn’t require massive tillage afterwards.

Finally, finishing tools. The sister to vertical tillage, finishing tools with discs, tines and rolling baskets turn the soil into powder that most farms are looking for when planting. These are the soil conditions that allow planters to travel at high speeds, like 10 mph for new planters. In the transition period away from aggressive tillage and finishing tools, our current planters and drills can work in soils with limited tillage. The need for finishing tools fades as we change our deep tillage and go lightly with vertical tillage tools. As roots systems from cover crops become more robust, we will want to make sure planter disc openers can cut through the sod and the closing systems can close the seed trench. Once we open up cover crop soils, it often takes multiple passes with finishing tools to break apart root balls and create conditions we can plant into. Best we adjust our planter settings. In time, as soils become more mellow with higher organic matter, closing the seed trench becomes easier. In the transition years, it takes specialized features added to our equipment.

Sustainability requires less tillage and fewer tools. In the transition period, it is best we modify the use of our current tools before we look for new tools to add. As soils improve, there is limited and very specific need for specialized no-till equipment. There is no need to jump from one equipment line-up to another new equipment line up for no-till when the goal is to drastically reduce tillage in the end. The transition period is the most challenging, but be patient and learn what equipment you really need as you go.

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