Chisel Plows Verus Furlough Plow which is better?

For grins and giggles I hooked my JD 1600 11 shank chisel to my 5320 4 wd with the loader attached for ballast....he-he! made a perfect anchor! This tractor dyno'd 63 horses.....add 63 more and 4,000 pounds and it might pull it. Gotta match the plow to the mule.

You didn't provide any of that. :)

In my soil & climate, it is very common to fall chisel plow soybean stubble that will be planted to corn the next spring, and to molboard plow corn stalks that will be planted to beans the next spring.

Chisel plow loosens up the ground, leaves it rough, leaves most of the trash on top of the ground to protect it from wind/water erosion. Can be difficult to get crop trash through them unless you chop it or disk it or both first.

Regular plow will turn under the trash & weed seeds, lets the ground dry out & warm up a lot better in spring, cuts off perannual weeds to really slow them down, leaves you a clear seedbed to plant fussy crops. Takes more hp, longer, or both.

Either one can set up a plowpan if you use heavy equipment or work the ground when wet. Typically around here the plow goes 8 inches deep, the chisel 10 inches, so they don't follow the same pan.

So, what do you want to do? Both are heavy tillage, but accomplish different things.

--->Paul

A chisel will rough it up enough so that the wind can't lift and take it away. I always chiseled across the direction of the prevailing winter winds which are out of the northwest in this area.

Allan

We use both. A moldboard plow works great for plowing under sod (hay) feilds to put them back in corn. We've chiseled a few in the past and had poor results because the chisel doesn't turn under all of the alfalfa like a moldboard plow does.

In corn feilds though, they work great. We rent a 7-shank Brillion Soil Commander (disc chisel) from the local dealer. We did most of our fall tillage last weekend, with the exeption of 1 feild we are going to moldboard yet.

It seems every body has a different opinion of what a chisel plow is. In our area, it's primary tillage only, not done after moldboarding like some have suggested. That's a feild cultivator. Chisel plows are defined by how many shanks, not how many feet wide they are, and all the ones I've seen used in our area have twisted shovels. There are other types of shovels, but for primary tillage that's what you generally want.

In our soil, we pull either a 7 shank disc chisel, or a 4-16 moldboard plow with our Oliver 1855, which pushes 105 HP. Chisels cover more ground with less time and fuel, but are not ALWAYS the best answer.

There are several factors to consider. What size tractor do you have? What are your soil conditions? How deep do you want to go? What are you going to be working up? If it's any kind of sod, I'd go with a moldboard plow the first time. After that, you can use the chisel plow here & there.

Donovan from Wisconsin