# sub-soilers



## lp14255 (Nov 14, 2010)

is it worth my time and fuel to sub-soil the hay feilds , if so why ?


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

From personal experience I'd say no. Alfalfa is a tap root crop anyways and will do away with some compaction on it's own.


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## Toyes Hill Angus (Dec 21, 2010)

my own thought is no. People subscribe to many different schools of thought on this one, but here is mine; the reason I would use a subsoiler would be to break up compaction. Instead of releiving the compaction in the surface layers of the soil because conditions 12-18" (or whatever depth you work to) below the surface are rarely fit to work, espicially in the fall what you do is transfer the compacted area down to depth that you worked to. Compaction on or near the surface is not ideal by any means but 12- 18" is dramatically worse. This is because we have to rely on nature to releive compaction at this depth, and this can take years to overcome. The leading edge of these deep tillage tools are designed to fracture the soil by lifting and separting promoting aeration and other naturaly occuring compaction releivers like worms and bacteria to live in the soil once again. I have used one, my dad owns one, but even he has come around to my line of thinking... They can cause far more harm than good if conditions are not right. Here in the caly, if conditions were right at the working depth it would be nearly impossible to pull the implement through the ground.


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## cdhayman (Jan 25, 2011)

I would imagine alot of this depends on your soil, and what kind of hay you are raising. If you are only raising alfalfa, then you can probably get by without ripping. we do alot of alfalfa, but we also do alot of grass, and when we rotate out and get ready to go back to a permanent stand, we rip everything. the main reason is because there is no doubt in our minds that it helps deal with compaction, but it also helps us rip up the sod and allows us to till it in a little easier.


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## Toyes Hill Angus (Dec 21, 2010)

I hear what you're saying cdhayman, I just don't see the piont when you got a crop with a huge tap root like alfalfa. Guys plant alfalfa here for no reason but to break up the compaction in heavily cash cropped land. But as you say it makes life easier to manage after the alfalfa, then i guess you would have a piont. When the alfalfa has seen the last of its useful hay producing days here it gets manure, and than a shallow plowdown to incorporate into the soil. I am sure a good set of newer offset discs would do the same if you had one.?


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## Mike120 (May 4, 2009)

I run a subsoiler around my horse paddocks on occasion. I still have to rework them about every 3 years. It probably doesn't do much good but it makes me feel better. My neighbor just ran over his fields with a Hay King Pasture Renovator that he bought. He grazes them once in a while, so we'll see if it makes any difference. You have to be careful with them, if it's too dry you tear up the ground. Too wet, and it just closes back up. The only real use I've found for a subsoiler is that it's great for pulling poly pipe in the ground.


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## cdhayman (Jan 25, 2011)

well, like i say, we do an awful lot of grass, and after several years, the fields get extremely soddy and we just hate having to disc and plow that crap. it is so dang hard to deal with. so what we do now is we run the ripper through it to tear up the sod. after that we run a tiller through it, kinda like a little garden tiller, but supersized and for agricultural use. we actually run the same tiller as the on on this webpage, Northwest Tillers, Inc | NWTillers.com | Sod Buster we run the tiller through it and it leaves it just about perfect for planting whatever it is that we plant. so, for us, the ripper helps the grass field's compaction and helps make it easier to till in.


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## Toyes Hill Angus (Dec 21, 2010)

That's quite a tiller. How deep will it work? I've got an old 8' rototiller that I will use occasionaly (mostly in the wife's garden the last few years) but it will realy dry the ground out fast, does that rolling harrow help?


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## cdhayman (Jan 25, 2011)

it absolutely does help. i think it will till as deep as 8 inches, which is really just about right for what we want it to do. i'm actually not at the farm for the winter, my wife and i are off at school, but they wanted to experiment with residue incorporation, so they put 15 or 20 bales of 3rd cutting on my garden, and they said it tilled it in so well that you wouldn't have been able to tell that there was hay put there


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## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

Where I think sub-soilers are really useful are in instances where water ponds in spots in fields after spring rains or any downpour. If a sub-soiler is pulled thru these areas just below the "pan"(typically in TN about 18"deep) and spaced about 48" apart these areas will then let the water down into ground much more rapidly helping to eliminate weak areas in grasses or crops. Regards, Mike


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## vhaby (Dec 30, 2009)

There are conditions where sub-soiling helps. One dryland alfalfa field in south central Montana was so compacted that alfalfa tap roots, on hitting the compacted soil layer, turned ninety degrees and grew horizontally (parallel with the soil surface) from there on. Needless to say, if rainfall didn't frequently occur, the topsoil dried out and the alfalfa did not produce well. The farmer ran a sub-soiler through this field and the soil was moving from the ripping shanks to the front of the tractor.

One way that might be useful to determine if sub-soiling is needed would be to take a 3/8th to a 1/2 inch rod cut to about three feet long, weld a handle on one end of the rod and grind a point on the other end. If this rod cannot be pushed its length into the soil when the soil is moist and the rod doesn't hit a rock, one might consider the need for sub-soiling if alfalfa or other crops are not sufficiently productive.


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## hay wilson in TX (Jan 28, 2009)

Not here but out near San Angelo, TX. 
Fairly typically the range land was over grazed some time in the distant past.

Then the hard driving rains packed the ground. 
With out an immediate reduction in stocking rate the range become permenantely over grazed and compacted. 
Eventually the carrying capacity was very close to deer only.

Soil Conservation/NRCS came in and with a bull dozer, pulling a long shank subsoiler on the contour and about every 10 yards for spacing. 
All the rain water would go down these slots and grass did grow, on the contour. With management the range recovered.

With a little management that whole exercise could have been avoided. That is another different topic.


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## sedurbin (May 30, 2009)

Using a sudsoiler around the treelines to cut the tree's roots and also the ends of fields where you turn around frequently will help. Best to do in late summer early fall when the ground is driest so it will fracture better.


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

Sub-soilers used to be the rage around here, now hardly see em. People found investing in tile will go a long ways towards eliminating compaction, past, present and future. This came about after a lot of folks figured out that if they really waited until the sub soil was dry enough to get a good fracture, they didn't have near enough tractor to pull it or couldn't afford the fuel if the tractor was big enough.

I'm talking running 18-20 inches deep. I have a 24 foot chisel plow we built with the shanks on 16" centers, pull it with a 380hp 4wd Massey, can pull it 14" deep if necessary. Stopped doing that as I was skinning the tops of tiles here and there. That and got real tired of picking rocks. Even running 14" deep very few years actually seen the soil at that depth dry enough to get a real good shatter.


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