Shallow cultivation requires high speed and plenty of horsepower for best effect. Andrew Faulkner develops a taste for all three, knocking down 50ha of autumn-ploughed ground with a 200hp Case MX220 Magnum and 5m wide Väderstad Carrier disc/press cultivator. How did the Carrier perform?
When it comes to cultivation there’s no quick fix, no simple solution. If there were, those peak autumn/spring periods would be a doddle. And no fun at all.
Plough, min-till, no-till – there’s certainly no shortage of options. And now, according to Väderstad, we have another: Shallow cultivation. A variation on the min-till theme, shallow cultivation comprises moving just the top 25-50mm of soil, hence keeping any straw/soil mix near the surface and in an aerobic environment, rather than mintill discing down to, say, 100mm to try and bury more of the straw. That’s the theory, anyway.
But we’re not here to talk agronomy. Of greater interest on these pages is the hardware that Väderstad uses to achieve this shallow soil disturbance: The Carrier, a disc/press cultivator that the Scandinavian firm sells as the ideal, highspeed preparation tool to run ahead of its Rapid cultivator drill. To get a feel for Carrier performance we tugged the cultivator direct over some over-wintered stubble andthen across autumn-ploughed land; the unit is said to be dual-purpose, so we decided to try it in both field situations.
First, though, a little history. Launched at Agritechnica ‘99, the Carrier is the latest Väderstad ‘roller’ product from a family line that stretches back to the 1970s and the firm’s Rollex Rolls. With more farmers looking cultivate with their rolls, the Rollex spawned the Rexius Rolls in the early 1990s, complete with characteristic ‘Rexius’ fold-up system (see pics) and heavier build to accommodate front levelling boards. This, in turn, resulted in the heavy Rexius Twin double press (profi international 12/98) and finally the high-speed Rexius Carrier in 1999. Incidentally, even though the Carrier still sports the Rexius Twin and Rolls fold-up system, the latest version has dropped the Rexius label. Too many ‘Rexiae’ spoil the…and all that.
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