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Corn and tomato crops Between Tony, his father, Max, and cousin, Wayne, the Carlands grow nearly 1,000 acres of corn and rent land each year for tomato and bean production. The deep, silty-loam soil beside the Mills River, about 20 miles south of Asheville, North Carolina, is choice land for growing tomatoes. To prepare the fields, the soil is ridge-tilled, fertilizer is applied and a drip irrigation system is installed. The rows are covered with biodegradable plastic mulch, and the soil is sterilized. In late April, tomato seedlings are transplanted and staked to support the vines as they develop. Harvesting by hand begins in July and continues until frost stops fruit production in early fall. By then, the vines are about five-feet long. “These are big, heavy vines, about as big around as your thumb, and they’re strong,” Tony says. Field cleanup starts with pulling out the stakes and pulling off the plastic by hand. Tony says, “What’s left is these vines. They stay green and lush, and they’re hard to do anything with.” After harvest, getting rid of the tomato vine residue is a time-consuming, expensive job. Standard procedure is to run a disk harrow over the field three or four times. The disk harrow can work the ground at a rate of about ten acres an hour. It’s a frustrating time for the operator, who battles the vines as they “wad up, pile up, and make humps you have to knock down.” Under the vines is another obstacle to the next crop. The naturally soft soil has been hard-packed. Tony explains, “During the summer, they’re picking with trucks and tractors and spraying so they run over the ground a lot. They pack the ground until it’s just as hard as can be.” Mulch-till ripper Tony decided to put New Holland’s new three-stage tillage tool to the test. He first saw the mulch-till ripper operating in corn stubble at a sales meeting, and decided to try it on his crop. He took the ST740 to the tomato field, before any harrowing was done, just to see what it could do. “It chews the tar out of those tomato vines!” Tony says.
Tony uses fall rye as a cover crop on the tomato land, and plows it under in spring. The ST740 handled that job, too. Corn stubble Tony wasn’t totally surprised by the job the ST740 did in tomato vines because he’d already seen similar performance in his corn. Good corn in his area comes in at 200 to 225 bushels an acre. Corn stalks, cut off at two-feet tall, are just about as hard to deal with as the tomato vines. Traditionally, stalks first are broken and beaten down with a Bush Hog. Then, they’re disked two or three times before a turning plow can get the field ready for re-cropping. “You can go behind a combine in stalks that are two-feet tall and the mulch-till ripper just eats the stalks alive with one pass,” Tony says. All that’s left for spring is to go through once with a disk harrow and then the planter. Wide spacing on the front set of disks is part of the secret for the success, Tony believes. The spacing is 12 inches, about twice what he has on his disk harrow. “The disks just roll right on through, and keep cutting the stalks up,” he says. If he tried that with his disk harrow, it would quickly stop cutting and soon be dragging the stalks. Another reason for the success is the disk design. “The disks have a flat center,” Tony says. “I’ve never seen a disk like that before. It cuts the residue without throwing soil beyond the machine.” He set the middle ripper unit to work at 12-inches deep. At the bottom of each shank is a tiger point that, for Tony’s field, is five-inches wide. “It’s got a design like no other point I’ve ever seen,” he says. “It penetrates the hardpan and just shatters the ground. They say you can go 16-inches deep with it.” The tiger points are the only tillage points that fracture compaction and reorient the soil through a unique twisting and rolling action. At the same time, Tony notes, the unit has “plenty of clearance” for the trash to flow right on through. The third part, another gang of disks, hits the trash and “smoothes” it back out into the field. “On the corn stalks, we saved ourselves four trips across the field with the mulch-till ripper,” Tony says. “This thing is unbelievable! |
