Vertical Tillage

[SRFarms]

Does anyone in Alberta use a vertical tillage tool? If so, is it just to chop and lightly incorporate straw into the soil? I wanna know if it is worth finding a Great Plains or Salford machine rather than using heavy harrows

[seabass]

We used a Salford RTS this fall. Very dry and the ground was hard. There seemed to be no difference between the part of the field that was heavy harrowed but it definitely showed up in a few weeks.
There was alot less trash on the side that was ran over with the Salford. This was on wheat stubble. No noticeable difference on canola stubble at all.
I think in a wetter fall u would see alot more blackening of the soil and more trash pushed in the ground.

[brian99]

We've used a salford and I'm not sure it will do what you want. Unless you go to the RTS extreme, it wont bury trash any better than a heavy harrow IMO. Vertical tillage machines mostly open up and fracture the surface and let water in, moving around a bit of trash and soil. They do chop large trash (like corn) and prep the seedbed with the right tools at the back. You could look at a Joker or a Lemkin, but they are lots of money.

[SRFarms]

Okay thanks. I am going to demo some kind of
unit this spring for prepping my seedbed for corn.
See how that works compared to a conventional
disk that I use.

[brian99]

The alberta alfalfa seed commission is doing a tillage demo on alfalfa seed this spring. We are testing 2 lemkins, a joker, a madara, a kelly harrow,the new john deere 2635, the case turbotill and a krause for trash incorporation and preemerge chem uniformity. the plan is to video the whole thing and put it up on the commission website. I'll put a link to it here when it's up.