Plowing down cornstalks

each time i plow down cornstalks or plow any ground that has a lot of ground cover the plows easily get plugged up.

Cornstalks, what do you guys do?

bush hog them first
disk them first or just plow them under with no pretillage

last year i bush hogged them, then disk them, then spent half my time out beside the corn patch trying to unplug the stalks out of my plow.
also i have tried with coulters (off or on) did not make any difference.
plows are in good shape with new coulter blades.

any suggestions are appreciated.

plows do a great job on land that has little ground cover, could the 12" plows just not have enough open throat for the cover material to flow through????? ????

that is the way to go, tiller,

I had access to one a few years ago, but my neighbor pasted away and the family moved the tiller to a different location.

maybe someday i can get one.

with a tiller, you can almost take the plow/disc and move them to the big tool shed up in the sky.

only problem i ever had with the tiller: it would break the ground up so fine, that if it did rain shortly after planting, my ground would seal over. The plants would break there necks coming out of the ground.

but the tiller did a great job of breaking up the soil and left the garden level with no tracts.

12" plows are good if all you want to do is just make the ground mad.

I will try disking the stalks down at a angle to the rows. I have a light too med 6ft disk so you know its not going to do much cutting up corn stalks, just roll over them.

I have an old team one row stalk cutter sitting out by my wood shed. Older fellow told me once, that was the greatest tool he ever saw as it help them cut up the corn stalks so they could disk them in with a team disk.

Guess the bush hog cuts the stalks up but fills the corn row middles up with stalks as i have the rows ridged up. The plows choke up when they get are trying to turn over the ground in the middle of the rows that have all the corn stalks.

I do like to get the corn stalks turned under before winter so they can rot as i like to plant this corn patch early.

Thanks again for your corn stalk plowing tips.

will let you guys know how it turns out this year.

****maybe i need to add a 3pt hitch to that old corn stalk cutter and put it back in service.

Larry

The only real solution is a plow with more depth clearance and shredding the corn stalks. Trash clearance is one of the biggest reasons wider plow bottoms came about. The 12 inch plows where a carry over from the old horse plows.

I try very hard to not do anything, just plow the stalks. It helps to combine the same way you will plow. I also spent sdome money on a plow with lots of cleaqrence, 20 inch bottoms. New large colters set deep.

Sometimes disking only makes it worse. Esp if your disk is similar to the plow, small & light....

Generally chopping them with a corn stalk chopper (heavy duty flail mower for non-farmers...) works well, sometimes you need to run a disk through that but usually not.

Your plow has very little clearace for trash, so you have about the worst setup for plowing stalks. Your coulters appear to be set too shallow. You might need to do a better job of chopping the stalks, a brush hog type might not chew them up enough - slow down with the hog might help. I need to make my stalk pieces smaller than 20 inches. You need to make yours smaller than 12 inches.....

--->Paul

Reset your coulters deeper. I set mine 1' above and 1' to away from the point. That will help you a bunch

mf 62 plow