Tillage Machines
What tillage machine is the most sustainable?
and what type of tillage approach (minimum, primary, rotary, one pass etc)
(is the most sustainable)?
* and what type of soil type and topography is this approach and machine best for?
For inorganically fertilised farming systems in flat areas that receive reasonable rainfall, deep 'mouldboard' ploughing is acceptable. However, overall this farming system results in low soil organic matter levels and other problems can build up (plough pans etc.). It may be better to use minimum tillage systems but that means more herbicide use, and ploughing will still be needed to control weeds every few years.
For conventional inorganically fertilised arable systems in semi-arid regions (and especially semi-arid hilly regions) where traditionally ploughing was used and fallow seasons were used in the rotation, then it is definitely better to replace ploughing with reduced tillage cultivations. These use shallow cultivation implements (disking, chisel, harrow). This will enable you to reduce the bare fallow periods, which will be better for the soil and enable you to produce more crops, whilst still achieving some weed control.
However, in semi-arid regions, because of the fragile soils, it is really best to avoid regular cultivation and inorganically fertilised arable systems. A good option then is to use mixed farming systems, where the land is in a rotation that alternates several years in pasture (with grazing livestock) with a few years in crop production. The grass periods and the manure from the livestock will maintain the soil fertility and soil carbon store. Better though is not to do arable farming and keep the land in grass and grazing livestock.
For steeply sloping land, ploughing should be avoided as too much soil and carbon is lost by erosion. It is best to keep the land in grass for grazing livestock or in woodland.
Similarly, in high organic soil types (eg. peatland), even if they are excellent for arable production/plantation because they are fertile, far too much soil carbon is emitted if the land is cultivated, so it is best to avoid crop production and keep the land in natural habitat, or grass.
No till systems mean broadcasting the seeds on the surface, but they rely on heavy herbicide use for weed control, which I'm not sure is a good idea.
However, for all climatic, soil, and topography types, the best systems for sustainability are organic farming. This produces much higher soil organic matter levels (larger soil carbon store, good soil structure so less erosion and better drainage) and higher soil moisture levels (reducing need for irrigation and maintaining yields in drought conditions.) In most regions organic farming uses deep ploughing, but this is not the problem that it is in non-organic farming systems, as the ploughing is used to incorporate organic matter into the soil (grass/clover leys, animal manure, green manure etc.). Unlike reduced tillage systems (in which the crop residues just accumulate on the surface), this combination of ploughing and incorporation of organic matter produces stable humus in the soil and builds up soil organic matter throughout the soil depth. Organic farming also commonly uses mixed farming systems, ie. rotating grass/clover and livestock, so that the land is in grass and not cultivated for a third to half the time. Grass and clover are excellent for building soil organic matter levels and the clover provides nitrogen to fertilise the crops.
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EVO-Tech Industrial Machine Performance Chip Primary Tillage powered by VW engine 8.0L WR16 64V gas fuel injection $299.98 MAGNUMTUNING FACTORY EVO - Industrial Machine Performance Chip featuring remote control is a fully adjustable vehicle specific Industrial Machine performance chip also referred to as fuel controller designed to fuel injected gas/ common rail diesel engines. It tricks signals being read by the ECU, resulting an adjustment to the fuel curve, which is what causes the increase in HP, as well as improv... |
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EVO-Tech Industrial Machine Performance Chip Primary Tillage powered by MAN engine D0834 $299.98 MAGNUMTUNING FACTORY EVO - Industrial Machine Performance Chip featuring remote control is a fully adjustable vehicle specific Industrial Machine performance chip also referred to as fuel controller designed to fuel injected gas/ common rail diesel engines. It tricks signals being read by the ECU, resulting an adjustment to the fuel curve, which is what causes the increase in HP, as well as improv... |
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EVO-Tech Industrial Machine Performance Chip Primary Tillage powered by John Deere engine PowerTech PVX 4.5L $299.98 MAGNUMTUNING FACTORY EVO - Industrial Machine Performance Chip featuring remote control is a fully adjustable vehicle specific Industrial Machine performance chip also referred to as fuel controller designed to fuel injected gas/ common rail diesel engines. It tricks signals being read by the ECU, resulting an adjustment to the fuel curve, which is what causes the increase in HP, as well as improv... |
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FMO, Fundamentals of Machine Operation - Tillage ... |
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Soil-Machine Interactions (Books in Soils, Plants, & the Environment) (Books in Soils, Plants, and the Environment) $97.80 Aiming to improve work efficiency in such areas as tillage in agriculture, earth-moving in civil engineering, and tunnel-making in sea-bed operations, this work offers an introduction to Finite Element Method (FEM) analysis of soil-machine systems. It explains the advantage of FEM's numerical approach over traditional analytical and empirical methods of dealing with complex factors from nonlinear ... |