FEELING TIRED? If you are serious about reducing soil movement to reduce costs in fuel and labour without reducing yield through compaction what are your options, and how do you ‘dip your toe’ without financial commitment? “Just looking thanks” is the phrase while on a manufactures show stand whilst trying to form your own opinion. How do you do a bit of non-bias research on system change on your farm? AHDB’s Monitor Farm meetings are one way, either on-line or in the future back to face to face meetings. But again how do you build a system for your farm, based on your soil type, your area to be covered and time available to you? To gain an idea of the size and width of a direct drill whatever design you choose you can look up the AHDB Machinery Calculator and mess with the width, forward speed and field efficiency (time spent actually drilling rather than turning and filling) and come up with a drill width to suit you. If the numbers don’t stack up, up the speed or more hours per day, eventually you will come up with a consensus of what you need. But as the power needed increases so does the weight of tractor need to pull the drill. Can you assess the level of compaction going in below where your chosen drill is working? Based on the weight on the tyres, soil type and soil moisture, yes you can. Terranimo is a website where you can select the tractor/implement combination or crop sprayer, combine harvester, beet harvester, Potato harvester, forage harvester for that matter. Select the tyres, calculate the weight on each tyre, select the soil type and soil moisture and calculate the depth of compaction based on the data you have entered. Hey presto you can generate a detailed report on your chosen set up. And, like the machinery calculator, if you don’t like what you see, change the numbers and try again. Nothing ventured and all that. For the lucky living in Scotland the soils data is already entered, just pick your county and the soil data at 10cm steps to 150cm depth is available. Choose between dry, moist, and wet for your soil water content and choose if you plough and cultivator or not. For those not living in Scotland work is on going to bring England into the fold, but for now your soil type can be entered manually. Of course, those reading these pages will be keen to remind of 52 DIRECT DRILLER MAGAZINE
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Above; Front tyres. 800/70R32 with 7250kg/tyre
Rear tyres. 540/85R26 with 5000kg/tyre
ISSUE 11 | OCTOBER 2020
