WINKLER, Man. – If you ask Karl Walkof how long he’s been doing vertical tillage on his Winkler, Man., farm, he’d tell you that he hadn’t even heard of the term until he read a story in The Western Producer last winter.
That story covered the Ontario-built Salford vertical tillage machine. Right away, he knew he had three specific uses for just such a cultivator.
“I need a machine like that for sunflower stalks, soybean residue and for terminating stands of turf grass,” Walkof said.
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Shortly after reading about the Salford rippled coulters, he read about an American built conversion kit that turns old chisel plows into rolling rippled coulter machines. The conversion kit seemed more in line with the kind of work he wanted to do on his fields, so he placed his order.
Vertical tillage uses a rolling rippled coulter to cut a slot in the soil. The typical recommended depth is one inch, so the coulter shatters the soil and lifts it to a depth of one inch only.
It’s important to note that the wavy motion of the disc edge does not leave a compressed layer in the soil. Soil below the disc path remains undisturbed and non-compacted.
Rippled coulters have been available from manufacturers in the corn belt states for decades.
But the idea of using them for shallow surface tillage and in zero till fields evolved more recently. As corn stalks became tougher, so did the challenge of managing them.
Ontario corn producers began experimenting with vertical tillage about five years ago. Since then, factory-built machines like Salford have become available on the Canadian Prairies.
Walkof bought his conversion kits from Ron’s Manufacturing in South Dakota for about $300 US each. He fitted them to a 27 foot Co-op 203 chisel plow.
“The two coulters on each hub are six inches apart. We’re on 13 inch centres with the plow frame. I suppose it might have been better if the frame had been set up for 12 inch centres so we would have had 100 percent surface disturbance, but this works just fine,” Walkof said.
He said the converted Co-op unit works well in sunflower and soybean stubble.
“On soybean land, the idea is to do the absolute minimum of surface disturbance because there’s so little residue to work with. You want to chop so the opener goes through for your next crop, but you don’t want to bury it.
“If you want to work your field and still leave trash on the surface, this machine certainly does accomplish that. It buries very little.”
Turf sod, however, is another story. It leaves far more residue and root matter than just about any other crop grown on the Prairies.
Walkof grows turf grass seed on contract. He said that in only one growing season, the crop develops a massive amount of trash, which he needs to manage before he can seed another crop on that land.
“Turf fields become so sod bound. It’s very tough, very dense after I terminate a crop. So I have to try to cut it up and pulverize it, otherwise I can’t get another crop seeded the next year,” he said.
“This year I tried these rippled coulters. I know we’re supposed to set them down to about an inch deep for the right effect, but for the turf sod, I figured out I can run them at 21/2 inches to three inches deep and they work just great.
“I know that’s no longer considered to be a shallow pass, but that’s what works for me on these tough sod fields. I run them shallow in sunflowers and soybeans, then set them deep for sod.”
Troy Mayes is another producer who recently learned about vertical tillage. After running the rolling rippled coulters on 2,500 acres of sunflower stubble this spring, he likes it a lot.
“After one pass with the rippled coulters, my sunflower stubble was ready for seeding,” said the Pierson, Man., farmer.
“It looked like it had been worked with heavy harrows. But there’s no way the heavy harrows would chop the residue like the rippled coulters do.
“Until this past spring, I always had used heavy harrows. It was OK for sunflower stalks if it’s a really clean field. But if you’ve got much kochia, the heavy harrows just won’t chop it or size it enough for the openers to pass.”
Mayes generally leaves sunflower stalks over winter and then chops them the next spring when they’re more brittle. He is convinced that one pass with the rippled coulters is all he will need to prepare sunflower stubble for the next crop.
When he decided to try vertical tillage, Mayes found a 59 foot John Deere chisel plow for $5,500. He figures it was built in the late 1980s or early ’90s. He then bought 60 coulter conversion kits from Ron’s Manufacturing.
“I wanted to install straight coulters rather than the rippled coulters. I really didn’t want to do any actual tillage. I just wanted to chop up the sunflower stalks and weeds,” Mayes said.
“But Ron strongly advised I get the rippled coulters, so finally that’s what I agreed to do. They don’t really move the soil that much, so it’s worked out pretty well.
“If you’re in zero till and you want to dry out some wet land before seeding, this will do the job.”
Mayes said the kits were easy to install. After 2,500 acres, there were no breakdowns. Although he doesn’t have many rocks, he said the coulters stood up well to any hits they did take. He says it’s important to grease each hub once a day.
Mayes added, “I think this might be a stronger conversion kit than some of the others I’ve seen. He’s got big ball bearings in there and there’s four sets instead of just two sets in each hub.
“Plus he’s got that steel cap over the outer bearings. On some other kits I’ve seen, they just have the rubber wheel seal exposed to the dust and mud and rocks.”
While those two Manitoba farmers bought vertical tillage conversion kits from South Dakota, an American farmer bought brand new vertical tillage equipment from Canada.
Jerry Janssen visited his local Case IH dealer and plunked down $45,000 for a new 30 foot Salford vertical tillage unit, complete with rolling baskets and adjustable harrows. The Barnesville, Minnesota, farmer has a different take on how his farm has benefited from the rippled coulters.
“Fall of 2004 was extremely wet. We couldn’t get any fieldwork started. Spring of 2005 we had all these corn stalks and wheat stubble that hadn’t been worked at all, and it was still so wet we couldn’t get into the fields.
“The Salford with the rippled coulters was the only machine that could go through the mud. If you could drive a tractor on it, you could till it.
“We have a John Deere 9200. In extremely wet conditions, we had a hard time pulling. It was tough going, but it worked. In the dry fields, we pull it with our little front assist tractor. That’s only 185 or 195 horsepower.”
Janssen knows the recommendation is to run the Salford at nine or 10 miles per hour, but he said it works fine for him at seven or eight m.p.h. Nor is he convinced that the shallow depth setting is right for his land.
“I set the machine as deep as we can set it, but it doesn’t go anywhere near that deep because it rides up on the coulters.”
Unlike the chisel plow conversion kits that run two rippled coulters per shank, Janssen said the Salford runs only one coulter per shank, but the shanks are on six inch centres.
The idea of rippled coulters may have been around in Iowa and Illinois years ago, but Janssen says farmers in western Minnesota had not seen them until about four years ago.
So far, Janssen has tried the Salford on corn stalks, soybean and wheat stubble.
“In the spring, it leaves the field absolutely tabletop flat and level.”
