cultivator use

Hi everyone. I know very little about planting. I have a small farm I put food plots in. I plant about three acres now. I have a plow, a disc and a pulverizer. I have a chance to buy a cultivator. When do you need use one? Would I really need one with the other implements I have?
Thanks, Barry

You use a cultivator for weed control after the crop is up.

Fogot to ask. Are you loking at a field cultivator or a row cultivator. If it's a field you can get by without it.


row for weed control, save $ on herbicide

There are field cultivators which work up the soil for seed bed preperation. About the same as you would use a disk (aka disk-harrow). These have become much more popular in farming than disks in most areas. You must use the puverizer for this step?

There are row crop cultivators. These have gaps to not kill your crop, and work up the soil between the rows to kill weeds. If you don't spray, you need to cultivate...

--->Paul

cultivators are for row crop work. if your planting food plots you don't need a field cultivator or cultivator. disk, break (turn over) the ground and disk it up until you have a nice seed bed and use a drag behind the disk makes a nice looking seed ben and its more level all over. being level keeps the chance for bird baths in the field that will hold water a long time and drown your planted crops out. a tiller is nice to have to make seed bed. they are slow to use. if you can find a drill to plant your crops with like millet, sow beans, you'll have a better chance a getting a good stand. if you don't want to go th route then you need a 3 pt hitch spreader that looks like a ice cream cone turned up side down. you can use ths to put out fertlize with and then your seed. i have mixed the two togehter and made just the one pas over the field and be done. you may need to put yout fertlize out at a bigger rate than when mixing it with seed. if you sow small sed mix it up with sand and it will help you have better coverage of the ground. small seed tend to run out fast and mixing it with sand lets you set the seeding rate easier. then a section harrow run over the seed bed to cover the seed is all you should need. sometimes you can rent a drill from the person you get your seed from or hire a neighbor to drill it for you and let him hunt one day or two on you. if you sow a grass seed type plot use a bush hog to cut a few paths in the fied from one end to the other and leave a lot of standing plant in between. the scarttered seed from the bush hogging will attrack birds and deere in a hurry. corn planted in a ditch that you can stop the flow of water in in the fall and let it back up around the corn stalks will bring ducks in to feed right off the corn on the stalk. takes i little bit of planning ahead to do that.

Right now most of the plots have clover in them. I did plant some beans with a two row planter but didn"t have much luck. Someone told me that I could broadcast the beans(About a half acre) and the drag a piece of chain link fence over it. I put some wheat out by broadcast when I first bought the place and it did pretty good. The cultivator has probably ten curved arms with triangle shaped points on it. Looks like from the responses I really wouldn"t need it.
Thanks, Barry

Are you talking about a field cultivator or a row crop cultivator.

A field cultivator is used after discing to level off the ridges then you drag a harrow over the soil to smooth it out finer before planting your crop.

A row crop cultivator is used after your crop is up and to keep the weeds out between the rows.

Bweb,

I sell a lot of small 6ft wide field cultivators on ebay. The people who have bought them had tillers before and they like the field cultivator better because it goes deeper. One thing to remember about a field cultivator is that you can adjust the sweeps on the main frame and you can make a row crop cultivator. So it can be used for double duty.

Hardly any farmer uses a disc around St. Louis area any more. I keep an 11 ft disc only to cut my pumpkin vines up in the fall. I make one pass with the disc then follow up with the field cultivator. The field cultivator leaves ridges about 10-12 inches apart and 6 inches tall. The ground sets like that all winter and next spring it dries out a lot quicker. The field cultivator is a must have tool if you spread fertilizer it works it in the soil real well.
You can also use the field cultivator to direct water where you want it to go.

Remember, every farmer has a field cultivator but not a disc now days.

Barry,

If you want you can give me a call best time is in the evening after 6pm.

Thanks,
John B.
Highland, Il.
618 654-2466

john b, what your refering to is more of a chiesel plow that leaves ridges and slots in the ground for water to run down into during the winter. once down in the ground and the slots are left open the water will freeze and bust the hard pan up to where water will soak in better. a tiller makes a fine seed bed because it pulverizies the land up to where its more of a powder. this powder lets the seeds be covered beter and in full contact with the soil to where it will germinate better. a field cultivator here is used in the spring to loosen the ground up after it has been disked or chiseled, depending on the crop resideue type, in the fall to let the corn stubble rot better. i'd hate to know i had to run a field cultivator over an area that has not been disked. what he is talking about is a field cultivator. if the plow points on it were long and narrow and some turned one way and some another then thats what we call a chisel plow. it took the place of the turning plow here before the notill platers came into use. you had to run a disk over chiseled ground in order to prepare your seed bed as most of the chisel work was done in the fall to help ward off erossion. different strokes for different fokes in different parts on the country. i'd hate to know i couldn't take a disk and go over trashy ground before i broke or chiseled it.

Certainly different strokes for different folks & conditions.

Here in southern MN, disks were used into the early 70s. By now everyone has one in the grove, and it will come out for a small patch or in odd soil conditions. But mostly the disk is parked, and a good field cultivator does most of the tillage in spring. They have spring tine harrow or rolling basket on the back, you go over the ground once and start planting.

I may disk the cornstalks the cows are grazing in spring, and if for some odd reason I do spring plowing I might disk that down. Otherwise the field cutlivator does the rest.

Plowing in fall I really hate to waste the fuel to chop the stalks or disk the stalks before plowing - try to just plow them as they are after the combine.

Here in the fine wet clay soils we have, a disk will try to make a concrete-hard surface, and creates a bit of a hardpan about 4 inches deep. It works more like a packer than a disk. Ends up not being a very good seedbed.

A field cultivator will open up the soil, let some air in so it can dry out. It puts the lumpy stuff on the surface, and leaves fine dirt about 2 inches deep, right where the seed will go.

So, here, in my type of soils, the field cultivator wins most agruments for spring tillage.

Fall tillage is a plow or chisel plow. There is no notill done around here - too cold & wet and too short a growing season, can't wait until June to plant. Gotta drive about 30 miles to see some strip till, and perhaps 50 miles to see any amount of real notill.

I know what you mean by calling his implement a chisel plow or field cultivator, some of those Dearborn era machines were a cross between the two. Not really as deep & tough as a modern chisel plow, but set up for rougher work than a modern field cultivator too, so somewhere in between.

--->Paul

Different areas have different names for the same tools. I'm in western Ill. The first picture is a field cultivator. The tines are close together and work at shallow depths. It is used for seedbed preparation. The next picture is a chisel plow, it is made for deeper, primary tillage, the shanks are usually about 1' apart, and are run 8" or deeper. Usually about as deep as the tractor will pull it. Don't have a row crop cultivator to show you, but the tines or shanks are spaced close together with a space between where the row is planted so you can work the middles and not tear out the crop unless you fall asleep and plow out crop (NOT GOOD). Newer row crop cultivators have a single beam for frame with shanks mounted behind on a parallel frame to allow it to move up and down independently as you go across the field to follow ground contour. Not much cultivating around here anymore, herbicides are used instead. A guy I work with said he pulled the row crop cultivator out of the fence row to use it this year, and his 15yr old son didn't know what it was or what it did. Hope this helps. Chris

http://www.steamengine.com.au/ic/tractors/ferguson/index.html

check out this site,

shows all types of implements for small tractors the fergy made.

i have the cultivator and field cultivator

per my way of thinking: a man can not have enough tools, you need one of each.