Re: No Till Drills, tractor horsepower requirement

Posted by Gerald J. on July 24, 2007 at 12:11:50 from (67.0.97.166):

In Reply to: No Till Drills, tractor horsepower requirement posted by arod on July 24, 2007 at 08:44:39:

Everything you would do yourself you can hire done by custom farmers, neighbors, elevators, and commercial crop prouction services and the costs are competitive with owning the equipment.

Going no till requires spraying herbicides and for other than glyphosate you pretty much need an applicator's license and you need that studying to make the application and handle the chemicals safely.

The limitations on hiring these things done is timeliness. A neighbor is probably going to want to finish his before starting yours and if the weather doesn't fully cooperate you don't get done in a timely manner and your crop suffers. And some spraying contractors seem to want to run with the wind even when the wind is strong enough to blow the spray to the next field if not the next county and with that much wind somtimes its hard to tell what is crop and what is the row. But after they have passed, the crop is run down. Not to swear that I NEVER run down crop when spraying.

You can build a small sprayer very inexpensively, wooden frame common tank and an electric pump. All the fundamentals are in the printed TeeJet catalog also in Sprayer Specialities catalog and the catalog from Heartland Agri Supply who tends to beat SS on prices all the time.

I pulled a 4 row JD 7000 planter with my MF-135 this spring. Didn't work the tractor hard at all and it was also carrying my home made sprayer with up to 300 gallons of fertilizer and pumping it to the fertilizer openers. If I'd had more front wheel weight I could have hauled more fertilizer. I could have run it with an even slower engine speed than 1600 rpm, but I needed good governor control so the fertilizer injection would come out as planned. With the constant pressure sprayer, poor speed control causes poor uniformity of material application.

To make the 7000 into a real no till planter it needs some sort of coulter (wavy used to be the rage, its not all that beneficial) to cut the straw and corn stalks so the trashwhippers can part the straw and there won't be hairpinning by the disk openers. I made my coulters do double duty by trailing them with thin ammonia knives and I put the 32% N down those to get it into the ground. My coulters came from my AC 2000 plow, the ammonia knives from a local sprayer supply, and the trash whippers are used ones made by Dawn to fit the 7000.

The picture is my MF-135, sprayer, and no till planter taken after I'd planted 10 sacks of seed corn last may. No til, it was the only thing that hit the field. I did my burn down spray later.

One bad thing about the 135 is that it doesn't clear much crop so I have a JD 4020 gas that I've modified a bit to fit the crop rows better with taller front tires and skinny rear tires. It did the last glyphosate spray and the fertilizer side dressing this summer, same sprayer, different attachments.

I had some MAP put down by one of the commerical companies and they did it on wet ground leaving 3" deep tracks from their floater which did not help my no til operation. That's one of the troubles of hiring parts of the job done, the commercial contractor may not have quite the pride in quality and preservation of soil.

Or you can rent the land out by various contracts and spend virtually no time or equipment and probaby get more income than you will doing it yourself. But you loose the contact with the soil and the exercise you would have gotten doing it yourself. I've been stirring or not stirring as in no til for 19 years, in the next year or two I'll be selling off my equipment and watching someone else get dirty.

The 80-90 hp diesel or gas tractor is often quite economical to own, sometimes cheaper to buy than a 35 hp utility tractor. The diesel is always more expensive to buy than the comparable gas tractor, but on 30 acres the difference in price may buy gasoline for more than a decade's operations. The gas 4020 is fairly common and deserves its reputation as a gas hog, but it still can do a lot of work though on my patch it took 2.5 times as much fuel to do the work in 1/3 the time that doin the same tillage with the MF-135 took. Both running on gasoline with appropriately size implements. But the 135 hasn't the ground clearance needed for the last cultivation or last spraying with the crop approaching 3' tall.

Gerald J.

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