BRANDON – Farmers in the most saturated areas of the Dakotas have had good luck drying fields with a new type of cultivator called the Joker.
Chris Fishback, who farms heavy soil in the Red River Valley at Warner, South Dakota, had tried various vertical tillage configurations in what he called a futile attempt to dry his waterlogged fields.
“You cannot use those types of implements if you have genuine mud,” Fishback said.
“All you do is just slab it up and roll it out. Then you’ve got yourself a rock when you’re done because those slabs turn to concrete.
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“You make a lot of extra work for yourself trying to get all the junk broken up and smoothed out again.”
Fishback said 2009 had been one of those bad years, with his combines leaving ruts a foot deep.
He decided to buy the largest Joker cultivator available from the nearby Horsch-Anderson factory.
“I went in with the Joker just before freeze up. It totally filled in the ruts and levelled things out in just a single pass.
“It dried things up better than anything else I’ve tried. That’s because it operates on a completely different concept than anything else.
“You don’t go deep. You run at a half-inch depth, just skimming the surface and breaking the crust. But it still dries things out.”
He said it’s aggressive like a rotary tine or Phoenix harrow.
“Every time a notch on a disc touches the soil, it moves that soil at least three or four feet to the left and the right.
“It’s like a tiller. It throws the dirt and mud probably four feet into the air. By the time you’ve completed a single pass, you don’t have anything left that’s bigger than a silver dollar.
“By running shallow over the surface, you don’t roll that mud up out of the field.”
However, all good things come with a price. Fishback said the Joker has a high power requirement because it needs speed to work as intended.
“The paperwork on this thing isn’t quite accurate. I’m pulling 25 feet with a 425 horsepower tractor, and it’s a handful. We need to run 12 to 14 m.p.h. to get the results we want.”
He said the machine is also a big power user because the tractor is running in mud and its discs are not flat like normal discs.
Fishback attributes the discs’ aggressive action to their deep concave that rips at the soil surface.
This action requires horsepower.
Fishback said some Joker owners run them deeper in the fall, perhaps as much as two inches if the mud is extreme.
He’s not convinced it’s necessary to go that deep, but if there is a deeper fall run, then a shallow spring run may be needed to create the best seedbed.
Horsch Anderson sales manager Jeremy Hughes said the Joker has been an effective tool for drying wet fields throughout the northern states.
“We’ve found the best combination on wet soil is to use the Joker with the Roll Flex Finishing System package behind,” he said.
“That combination lets the producer to get in the field planting sooner.”
The Joker has two rows of 20-inch notched discs mounted up front on torsion bars. Each pair of blades is mounted on oil sealed, maintenance free bearings. The blade pairs will trip up and over rocks, unlike traditional discs that are on a gang and can be damaged by rocks.
In heavy trash, the disc arm allows a better flow of material through the machine compared to traditional discs.
Spring-loaded packing wheels that follow the discs are another feature. Each wheel is made up of four spring steel segments that bolt to a central hub. Each segment forms a 90 degree arc comprising one quarter of the circle.
As a wheel revolves into the mud, one arc segment compresses from the down force, causing it to change into an arc that’s less than 90 degrees.
The spring pressure releases instantly when that arc segment revolves out of the mud, causing it to pop back to the original shape.
The violence of this compression release slings off the mud.
“We’ve done side-by-side field trials next to those big conventional tandem disc machines,” Hughes said. “They’re designed to plug with mud in my opinion. Straight disc gang axles and scrapers just provide more places for mud to collect and plug the machine.
“Plus, those big traditional discs just throw slabs over. We don’t see that slabbing effect with the Joker. It grinds them up and smoothens them out.”
Hughes said some customers in the Red River Valley and in corn country do a single pass with a deep ripper in fall and follow it with a single pass of the Joker in spring to achieve a smooth, uniform seedbed.
“I’ve even seen guys get a nice smooth seedbed with a single Joker pass after running a moldboard plow through their fields. Yes, moldboard plows. That wasn’t around here (Brandon). That was western Kansas.”
He said a second pass at a 20-degree angle will do the job if a single Joker pass doesn’t create the desired seedbed.
Horsch Anderson had imported the Joker from Germany but is now producing them at its factory in Andover S.D.
The new series is named the MT (mounted three-point) and are available in 13, 15 and 20 foot widths. The current RT (pull type) series is available in 20 and 25 foot widths.
Hughes said his company’s oldest Joker in the field has worked 20,000 acres. The discs are the only parts that have needed replacement.
For more information, contact Hughes at 605-298-5663 or visit www.horschanderson.com .
