"I got ready to plant small grain wheat in early October. I have a field cultivator that is 15-feet wide, but this disk is 30-feet wide and it has a setting on how deep it will cut. I had already disked the land, but it rained, so I needed to dry it out. Rather than use the 15-foot cultivator, I took the 30-foot disk and jacked up the height so it would cut 2-inches deep. It leveled the ground and dried it out, and I could plant the field the following day," says Clyde. "If you've got the right equipment, you can do that."

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Hay, cattle and cash crops

Clyde, a retired Naval officer, came back to his native North Carolina in 1983 and started a logging business that his son now operates. Twelve years ago, he decided to go back into farming, something he and his family did before he joined the Navy.

Clyde's farming operation is a diversified one. He raises 700 acres of corn, beans and wheat, about 275 head of cross Angus-Gelvie cattle, and 200 acres of Bermuda grass. The 2004 hurricanes were especially hard on his hay crop.

"We lost so much hay," he says. "Usually we spray it with liquid fertilizer after harvest and in six or eight weeks, we can cut it again. But this past year it was just too wet," he says.

Clyde uses a New Holland square baler and a round baler that he trades every three years. He also uses a New Holland TM165 tractor and two TN75D tractors for harvesting, tedding and windrowing hay, and for putting up bales. The TM165 is also used to no-till plant some pasture land.

Clyde Moore's ST440 disk harrows arrived just in time to tackle a difficult planting season.

For bigger jobs on the farm, Clyde uses a 215-PTO-hp New Holland TG255 tractor that he bought last year. That's the tractor he uses to pull his grain cart at harvest time and the ST440 disk harrow. "That's the only thing I've got that will pull the disk, and it has no problem with it," he says. "That tractor really has a lot of horsepower, so it can move." The TG gets a serious workout because Moore pulls the ST440 disk harrow across his fields more than once. "I've disked several thousand acres, because I use the ST440 to disk cut corn stalks and to fill in ruts," he says.

Clyde has worked with the same dealership all 12 years, even back when the dealership sold Ford equipment. He says his dealer has always provided good service and was especially helpful getting him up and running with his new disk.

When the ST440 arrived, the dealer made some adjustments moving the gangs out to 19 inches between the back two middle blades to take into consideration North Carolina's soil conditions. Out in the field, a New Holland Crop Production Specialist set the disk level from front to back increasing the depth by 1-inch until everything was just right, making it a welcome addition to Moore's equipment line up.

"This is a big, heavy disk that levels perfectly," he says.