A triumph of diesel & steel over grey-matter.
440hp doing what should not need doing
at all.
Agriculture Energy
waste.
Technology drives technology, what is needed is a fundamental
look at what nature does, and why, then adapt it to work WITH nature, instead of
fighting it. Nature has given us some very useful tools, yet very often things
that our ancestors did in ignorance are continued today because nobody takes the
time to ask...
WHY?
1:- SEEDING.
Nature does not require seeds to be buried.
There are a few exceptions to this, yet virtually ALL land is cultivated to prepare for the next crop. The mono-cropping of cereal crops makes
cultivation even more
illogical.
Facts from nature.
-
1a:- Most seeds are designed to germinate in the debris of the parent, they were not designed to be buried in bare soil.
Condensation caused by the differential of day/night temperatures causes dew to form on the debris, this is sufficient to germinate and establish the seeds. Removal/burying of debris requires 1" (22,645gal/ac 27,174US gal/acre) to initiate germination, further applications required for establishment in the absence of rain. -
1b:- Weather, Roots etc are restorers of soil structure.
But they need Time. The longest period for restructuring is between seeding and harvesting, so the soil is in its best condition to accept the seed of the next crop one minute before harvesting. Current harvesting practice entails 10+ton harvesters and 20+ton tractor-trailers running on the soil, consequently ruining the last X months restoration which then require increasing quantities of energy to remove. -
1c:- We have a old saying 'One years seeding, seven years weeding', this is still true today, the reason being that ploughing in weed seeds spreads the germination over numerous years. Leaving them on the surface to germinate naturally, and then killing them off, drastically reduces the problem.
Different species have different depth limitations, ploughing them in does not kill them, merely makes them dormant until they are ploughed out again. On the farm where I live, archeologists excavated a Roman Villa, the site exploded with weeds which the archeologists said were 1800 years old. I queried this, and was given the contents of a pot they had just found, I put the soil in a germination tray, and sure enough up came the weeds. A Saxon burial site was a lot older, and it had the same result.
So WHY DO WE BURY THEM???
2:- CULTIVATIONS.
-
2a:- Cultivations have the potential of erosion that has damaged millions of acres of productive land.
-
2b:- Cultivations expose humus to oxidation, the extremes of this can be seen in fenlands such as East-Anglia UK, and the Everglades of Florida USA, where shrinkage can be measured in inches per year.
-
2c:- Canadian research (30? years ago) indicated that 60% of the cultivating energy on soft ground was consumed by moving the prime-mover (the tractor). On hard ground it was less, but how did it get hard?
So why move it? A lesson can be learnt from the steam-age, heavy cultivation was done by two engines, one each end of the field, winching a cultivator to and fro, indexing up for each pass. This could be improved with a bit of innovation. When a run was started, the idle engine would move up to the next position and automatically shut off, starting again from a signal from the other engine. The idle winch requires a brake, instead of a energy absorbing conventional brake, a generator could be fitted to create power for starting and system uses, this would minimise the overhead of a engine driven generator. The cultivator could have a swinging arm that laid the cable in next path line to aid tracking ability. As hydraulics would only be required intermittently, (moving the cultivator to the next position) the pump could be engaged on demand rather than contributing to the engine overhead requirement.
It does beg the question of :- if running on the cropping area was taboo, why would you need to cultivate? -
2d:- Swiss research (again about 30 years ago) on a 'shift on the move' transmission, found that the overhead of driving the system necessitated it's use earlier than an equivalent tractor (without it) showing signs of stress. It is not unusual to find a modern 100hp tractor doing the same work as we used to do with a 75hp, and that 75hp was using the equipment that was made for a 40-50hp.
There are several reasons for this:-
2d1:- The 40-50hp engine was an agricultural engine, a slow speed, high torque, long stroke, big fly-wheel with lugging ability. The 60's saw a change from the agricultural engine to a converted high-speed truck engine, plenty of power with the engine doing 90 to the dozen, light fly-wheel, no torque short-stroke with performance figures that looked good on paper, but in reality was a gutless wonder with no bollock when you needed it. This necessitated a requirement for change on the move transmissions with their top-end power robbing capabilities which required more horsepower to compensate etc, etc, etc.
2d2:- The first, last, and only tractor to be designed as part of a total system, was the Harry Ferguson 20hp grey 'Fergie', any, and all multiplication of hp has required technical 'patches' to be put in place. If one considers the Fergie at 20hp with a 2 furrow plough, a 200hp tractor should have 20 furrows, it can't because of the length, so it has to go faster. Also a 200hp can not efficiently transmit the power to the ground because of wheel spin caused by torque, so it has to go faster, which requires more hp to do the same job (everything resists movement, a rule of thumb figure of 'double the speed requires 4 times the power' gives an indication of how utilising the power available give a poor energy used factor). To take it a step further, one man with one horse (1hp) and a one furrow plough was reckoned to do one acre a day, a 20hp tractor should have done 20acres, a 200hp should do 200 acres, yet all of this is related to the efficiency of 'the man', no account is made of the energy used, further more, all the people that have left agriculture are doing jobs that use yet more energy.
2d3:- Weight. Increased horsepower has seen big increases in tractor weight, this has been counteracted by bigger tyres. Tractor manufacturers make a big ploy of pounds/square/inch completely ignoring the fact that there is X tons per Y sq yards. Low psi is relative to surface damage, tsy is very relative to below surface damage, thus requiring more horsepower to remove it. The tractor in the above picture could easily weigh 22tons, that weight pressing on a fragile superstructure like soil is very expensive.
3:- Utilizing Nature
-
3a:- Bed system.
This a system where the wheel tracks are marked out after ploughing, usually at 72 or 80 inches, and are used for all subsequent operations, including harvesting, this leaves the cropped area free from compaction. For obvious reasons the wheeling's required the most hp to recover, so the longer the wheeling's are left the better. I managed 7 vegetable crops without ploughing, and this was only terminated because of rotational needs, i.e. next crop was wheat. All cultivations were done 'in bed' with a 50hp tractor using specialist equipment, mostly designed/adapted in-house. The advantages were considerable, the major one was having the ability to cultivate at the right time for effectiveness, this is when the soil is too moist to take the weight of the tractor without doing excessive structure damage (which is ALL the time). Removing sub-surface compaction reduces 'capping' (heavy rain on a fine soil then dries like concrete, fracturing to give the appearance of a dried-up river-bed, this kills any seeds underneath, thus requiring re-cultivation before re-seeding), the occasional mild cap was easily controlled by a fast irrigation (<.25 in/acre) at night when the restricted seedlings were trying to come through. The lack of compaction also reduces the dependence on additional nutrients because the roots go deeper. An acknowledged expert once informed me that lettuce roots only go down 12 inches, I contested this, saying that root length is limited only by time or impediment, compaction being the main one as most people ploughed at 12 inches, is that not a co-incidence?, the following year I hosted a 'bed' demonstration and dug up a plant that had been trans-planted 3 weeks earlier with 26 inch roots. A few years later we dug up a lettuce plant with 'root-aphids' on roots 42 inches down. -
3b:- Gantry system.
This is a bed system covering about 30ft, and opens up vastly more options than the bed system, for a start you only need one 18 inch 'wheeling' every 30ft (5%), instead of 18 inches every 72 (25%), for vegetables it would give the ability to dual crop, and/or place the next crop between the rows of the old one.
For cereals, a lot of work was done in the 70/80's by David Dowler, a farmer in the UK, his work was investigated by several institutes, including one in Australia. He founded a company to manufacture spraying/spreading gantries based on the one he had made/used on his farm, he had also converted a combine to run on paddy-field tracks to minimise compaction, unloading ONLY being done on the headland tracks so that trailers did not run on the field.
A further move would be to remove the threshing mechanism from the field, and use a gantry that was a header that just cut the top 6-7 inches, leaving the rest of the crop standing. If the gantry had a minimum 6 ton carrying capacity, it could cover 484 yds (1 acre) of a 4 ton crop (plus, say 2 ton of straw) before unloading, again on the headland. The threshing would be more efficient done in a fixed location, the waste being used for drying (currently diesel or electricity is used) if needed, stored for/or used for power/heat generation.
Ploughing in volumes of straw locks up nitrogen for the short term, which necessitates application to compensate, leaving it standing would give a longer more gradual breakdown phase, it would also inhibit erosion over winter. Use of a basic weed-killer to clean the crop of weeds after about three weeks, then spreading the new crop seeds, thus eliminating all cultivations. -
3c:- Chemicals ARE required, to say otherwise is to say 'do as I say, not do as I do'. However, that does not mean that the first option should be the spray can. If more time was given to investigating WHY, and rectifying the cause, instead of 'cure the symptom', which is indicative of society today. Alternatives to chemicals can be found in nature, when a plague of insects are attacking a crop, observe which plants (including weeds) in the vicinity have NOT been attacked. Crushing/chopping those plants into a tank of water, leaving to soak, and applying to the crop, can be an effective solution. Likewise, certain plants restrict what they will accept near them, investigating the which, why and how, could be useful.
-
3d:- Experience can be summed up as the net sum of what you have gained from your "cock-up's", failing to analyse them, and learn from it has led to the current dependence on 'artificial' solutions. A potentially major cock-up one year (high, and drying, winds restricting spraying) left me with part of a field covered with a weed we know as chickweed (a relatively low, shallow rooted, ground smothering plant) and lettuce drilling imminent. I chose to drill through the weed and hope the wind would drop so that we could kill the weed. It did, the result was 1:- that the soil was moister than the rest of the field, 2:- the crop was protected by the still standing debris, 3:- Harvest was 4 days early due to the rapid start.
There MUST be an even lower shallow rooted plant for 'ground cover' uses!
More to come (if, and when, I get the time)
How does one get funding for the logical adaptation of nature????????
