THE EVOLUTION OF THE £8000 ZEROTILL DRILL
Back in issue one of direct driller Mike Donovan of Practical Farm Ideas wrote about our budget no-till drill in his article “How to start drilling for 8k”. The drill had been bought and modified at the time to run along our John Deere 750a, partly to increase capacity to cope with a seemingly ever expanding workload in constantly tightening weather windows and also to provide a low disturbance tine option, complementing the disc coulter of the John Deere machine, by Clive Bailye - twitter.com/TWBFarms The question of tine vs disc on notill drills has been frequently debated amongst farmers. The disc can cope with extraordinary amounts of trash that would turn a tined drill into little more than a rake yet it some situations the disc can push straw residue into the slot, a process commonly referred to as “hair pinning” with undesirable agronomic consequences for the plant, whilst the tine avoids this by sweeping the seed zone clear of trash. Coulter designs like the Cross Slot and Novag drills combine the trash handling ability of a disc drill with the slot clearing characteristics of a tine equipped machine but come at a cost both financially and in terms of power requirement, for the direct driller looking for a single drill this design of coulter possible best provides that solution. Some disc drills are fitted with row cleaners that clear the
The original convesrsion
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trash ahead of the coulter, as our farmed area grew and we needed to use both the 750a and converted C06 in situations with hair pinning potential we did ultimately end up with a set of Aricks row cleaners imported from Australia fitted to our 750a, which although a good solution, not a cheap option or always one available to UK farms. The initial modifications carried out to the CO6 are covered back in issue 1 but other than a good service, fitting a 2nd small seed / slug pellet / avadex applicator and conversion to a low disturbance point it was still mostly as it had left the Horsch factory. Since then we have covered many acres with this machine and the modifications have evolved to become what I now think it’s the perfect tine drill solution.
Drawbar We opted to buy a European spec Co as the seed carts ran a far superior single floatation tyre than the small double
Drawbar and K80 hitch
ISSUE 11 | OCTOBER 2020
