# No tillers beware,makeing it black!



## swmnhay

__ https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1357411007604941


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## discbinedr

Ah...recreational tillage.


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## stack em up

Brother did some inline ripping on a farm that we had some terrible ruts where it was so wet. Pulled like a bastard! I picked up 160 acres for next year that the owner was wondering if I wanted him to rip it, plow it, or leave it. I said leave it. I just bought a coulter strip till bar (actually an old ridge till fertilizer bar) and will build my strips in the spring.


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## swmnhay

discbinedr said:


> Ah...recreational tillage.


It's not recreational in my corner of the world.Heavy wet soil,plus our shorter growing season here pretty much requires fall tillage to be able to get it planted in the spring because with out it it remains to wet to even get it planted.

Pretty much everything is fall tilled here includeing bean stuble.

20 yrs ago everyone(University smart guys,magazines etc) was telling us it was recreational tillage and alot quit tilling bean stuble just to have a field with a scum of leaves and trash that sealed up and would not dry.

Here frost is our friend to break up clay particles and mellow the ground and tillage helps the frost get in the ground deaper,it don't have the trash blanket.


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## PaMike

So why use the GPS for tillage? Is there any advantage instead of just looking out the side window?


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## swmnhay

PaMike said:


> So why use the GPS for tillage? Is there any advantage instead of just looking out the side window?


Alot of guys skip a pass so you dont have to turn so short.Then come back and fill it in.

With GPS u can take a video,lol.

With GPS you can read Haytalk,etc.

There is less fatigue,I only just put it in this spring but really like it


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## BWfarms

swmnhay said:


> Alot of guys skip a pass so you dont have to turn so short.Then come back and fill it in.
> 
> With GPS u can take a video,lol.
> 
> With GPS you can read Haytalk,etc.
> 
> There is less fatigue,I only just put it in this spring but really like it


Lazy sodbuster  he's buying the autonomous tractor next lol


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## PaMike

Do you have autosteer with the system?

I had some beans combined and with the bill then sent a yield graph of the field... pretty cool to see..technology is amazing.


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## swmnhay

PaMike said:


> Do you have autosteer with the system?
> 
> I had some beans combined and with the bill then sent a yield graph of the field... pretty cool to see..technology is amazing.


Yes its auto steer.Agleader system.

I dont have it in combine but alot do.I had a corn field combined by the feedlot and have the readout for that field.I'll try to post that later.


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## PaMike

I could see that gps and autosteer being pretty nice for skipping passes like you said. No 3 pt turns at the end of the field and no skippers when skipping a pass...everything comes with a price though..


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## Vol

That's some fine looking soil Cy. Very interesting about the need for tillage in your region versus what other folks do. Some people just cannot grasp the concept that "one size does not fit all".

Regards, Mike


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## swmnhay

__ https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1358495737496468


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## FarmerCline

Wow, that sure is some black, rich looking soil......looks like potting soil. Sure is a far cry from our gray gravelly and red clay soils.


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## endrow

Here cover crops take the place of tillage and I would bet years from now they will figure out how to grow cover crops in Minnesota and it will take the place of tillage. What a difference it is where I farm if you would start at one side of the farm a deep till the thing in the fall and just back and forth and till the entire farm. There wouldn't be no need to plant a crop in the spring all the top soil would be eroded away. With your dirt I guess it doesn't matter if you lose a couple inches here or there he'll never miss it.


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## swmnhay

endrow said:


> Here cover crops take the place of tillage and I would bet years from now they will figure out how to grow cover crops in Minnesota and it will take the place of tillage. What a difference it is where I farm if you would start at one side of the farm a deep till the thing in the fall and just back and forth and till the entire farm. There wouldn't be no need to plant a crop in the spring all the top soil would be eroded away. With your dirt I guess it doesn't matter if you lose a couple inches here or there he'll never miss it.


there are some trying cover crops,and it's subsidized from the FSA heavily,basically free.Even at free not many doing it in this area.I'll let them experiment with it.I see one that did it last yr got the ripper out this yr,musta not worked to well for him this spring when it was wet and he couldn't get in to plant when the neighbors could in there tilled fields.my soil is not prone to erosion so that's not a issue,where it is waterways and terraces are in place.

I tried no tilling beans for 5-6 yrs on a few farms,yields kept going down.they say give it a few yrs and I did.The soil will get more mellow THEY said,heck it got like a road and yields suffered.I will say on the 3 acres of light soil the yields were better,but my other acres suffered.So for my soil and climate notill does not work.

Different strokes for different folks and soil types


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## stack em up

We are giving no-till/strip-till a good chance, and seem to be having good luck so far. No-tilled beans on Mother's Day, the stuff we ripped last fall didn't get planted for another 10'days. Of course it piss poured rain in that time too. No-till definitely isn't for everybody, and it takes almost as much time scouting/managing as it does doing tillage. I just don't have time in spring and fall to do tillage when I need to be calving or making hay or fencing or______________. Sitting in a tractor ripping or digging is like nails to a chalkboard to me. Can't stand it anymore.

I had posted over on AgTalk about our no-tilling in southwestern MN, and had almost as many positive responses as negative ones. One poster had the nerve to email me asking me when our bankruptcy auction sale was as he wanted to know when he should hit my landlords up...

We did notice a yield drag to a certain degree on our beans in no-till, but some of that may have been from the water standing in a wet hole for so long. Who knows. We picked up 6/10 of a mile an hour combining beans this fall fersus the conventional tillage, but that doesn't pay the bills...

Our cover crops are still doing well. Haven't froze out yet, so every day we get is a blessing. I've had farmers call me asking about our cover crops, and then ended up selling them some seed, so it pays in different ways!

Like you say Cy, different strokes for different folks.

I'd like to be remembered as someone who didn't follow the norm, who pushed the envelope a tad, someone my son can be proud to say was his dad when I'm long gone and feeding the earthworms I've tried to get repopulated.


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## Gearclash

Vol said:


> That's some fine looking soil Cy. Very interesting about the need for tillage in your region versus what other folks do. *Some people just cannot grasp the concept that "one size does not fit all"*.
> 
> Regards, Mike


That is absolutely right. Here in the plains some of this land is so flat there might not be 10' of elevation difference from one end of 80 acres to the other. Erosion is not a problem then. No tilling soil like that really requires massive pattern tiling. I've seen guys no till some really flat heavy land and it seems the crops just never look right. On the other hand, go 2 miles and get into more rolling terrain and no till works well. I've been watching with interest the land right around my place. It is rolling ground in long term no till. I am mostly impressed by what I see. The soil texture is interesting because it is very firm as in rides rough with a tractor, but yet if you put a shovel into it is surprisingly soft.

I get into a lot of different fields in the fall to bale stalks, and most times I am dismayed by how much erosion has happened over the years and it is still happening. I've also seen that you can put in terraces, either grass back or broadbase, but soil erosion can still happen. I think no till is better at preventing erosion than terraces.


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## endrow

Free cover crops wow. Not trying to tell you what to do definitely tell you that you are wrong because I grow cover crops for the growing season is short. Did anyone ever try to rippers shatter the ground completely down to a very deep Depth, but leave the surface soil intact. So you can still plant cover crops, build organic matter and eliminate any chance of erosion. There are smaller areas in the East here that have Clay and would experience similar problems to yours and that is how they handle it.


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## swmnhay

endrow said:


> Free cover crops wow. Not trying to tell you what to do definitely tell you that you are wrong because I grow cover crops for the growing season is short. Did anyone ever try to rippers shatter the ground completely down to a very deep Depth, but leave the surface soil intact. So you can still plant cover crops, build organic matter and eliminate any chance of erosion. There are smaller areas in the East here that have Clay and would experience similar problems to yours and that is how they handle it.


Yes Free,enough to pay for the seed anyway for the basic Winter Rye or Triticale cover crop.I think it's called the CSP program.I know a couple guys doing it.Chop Cover crop in spring for feed,plant corn after that and chop that in fall.Repeat.They take a hit on the corn yield but get the cover crop for feed.

Deep rippers are good for finding older shallow tile lines here and could be a total disaster.Some old tile might only have 18" of cover.It was put in by hand.There was a few used here many yrs ago but I think they all got cut up for iron or parked in the grove.

I prefer alfalfa in my rotation for deep tillage.And tile.

Organic matter is high here and some guys bale off stalks and sell them to get rid of trash and get a higher yield where they bale it off.Probably not a good idea long term.What I bale off gets more manure hauled back on it then is taken off.

Here we try to get rid of the trash,or at least mix it up so the ground dries out in the spring.And by here I mean my farms not 30 miles away that has different soil types where no till could work fine

Frost is my friend to break up the soil over winter,with a cover crop or trash I wouldn't get as much frost.

Different strokes for different folks.


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## mlappin

swmnhay said:


> Alot of guys skip a pass so you dont have to turn so short.Then come back and fill it in.
> 
> With GPS u can take a video,lol.
> 
> With GPS you can read Haytalk,etc.
> 
> There is less fatigue,I only just put it in this spring but really like it


I endorse all of the above, use auto steer when planting beans, I've found the best way to keep the marker arms working is not to use em at all.

Nothing like seeing the rows come up and looked like they were snapped with a chalk line.

Especially when planting while using auto steer you can watch the planter a lot more to make sure everything is working as it should.

Thinking of getting another next spring for the tractor on the corn planter, Fathers getting up there to where it could save me a lot of aggravation of repairing the marker arms on the corn planter.


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## mlappin

swmnhay said:


> Deep rippers are good for finding older shallow tile lines here and could be a total disaster.Some old tile might only have 18" of cover.It was put in by hand.There was a few used here many yrs ago but I think they all got cut up for iron or parked in the grove.


Yup, have a lot of shallow tiles here, can't go deeper or the outlet would be lower than the ditch bottom or you'd have to make water run uphill. I've repaired numerous old tiles with nothing more than a shovel as it wasn't worth tracking the mini out to em.

A few we even had the county or state haul ditch cleanings out to em and built it over em as newer equipment is a lot heavier than the old stuff and tends to fracture shallow clay tiles.

Last tile we installed had to hire an excavator to come in to get thru the hilltop, our trencher will barely go 5' deep, our mini wouldn't go deep enough either, was faster and cheaper to hire a big excavator rather than move enough dirt of the hill top for the trencher. The high end of that tile only has 14" of dirt over it and we ran it with as little grade as possible to even get the 14" of cover.


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## endrow

swmnhay said:


> there are some trying cover crops,and it's subsidized from the FSA heavily,basically free.Even at free not many doing it in this area.I'll let them experiment with it.I see one that did it last yr got the ripper out this yr,musta not worked to well for him this spring when it was wet and he couldn't get in to plant when the neighbors could in there tilled fields.my soil is not prone to erosion so that's not a issue,where it is waterways and terraces are in place.
> I tried no tilling beans for 5-6 yrs on a few farms,yields kept going down.they say give it a few yrs and I did.The soil will get more mellow THEY said,heck it got like a road and yields suffered.I will say on the 3 acres of light soil the yields were better,but my other acres suffered.So for my soil and climate notill does not work.
> Different strokes for different folks and soil types


 Would like to get the Minnesota someday, I did learn a bit about their farming practices. The very young pastor at our Lutheran Church was raised in Minnesota, his family and his wife's family both had corn and soybean operations in the area of Hutchinson. He would take a week in the spring and a week in the fall and go back home to help with ,,you guessed it tillage. He left last year found a church closer to home just outside of st. Paul.


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## stack em up

When you wanna come endrow? I'll give you the $5 tour of our fair state!


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## PaMike

Anyone ever do a comparison in fuel costs in tillage vs no till? I guess with "cheap fuel" now the differance isnt as great but back when diesel was $3/gallon no till yields could suffer some and you would still be dollars ahead...

I know, no farmer likes to give up yields, but when fuel is expensive it might make sense..


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## swmnhay

PaMike said:


> Anyone ever do a comparison in fuel costs in tillage vs no till? I guess with "cheap fuel" now the differance isnt as great but back when diesel was $3/gallon no till yields could suffer some and you would still be dollars ahead...
> I know, no farmer likes to give up yields, but when fuel is expensive it might make sense..


just some rough figures for my operation.

Conv tillage
Inline ripper 1 gal per acre 1 pass in fall
Field cultivate .40 gal per acre 1 pass in spring
12 x 30 planter .20 gal per acre

No till
Burn down pass with sprayer.10 gal per acre
12 x 30 planter . 20 gal per acre for corn
20 ft no till drill .60 gal per acre

So for me it takes about 1 gal per acre more for Conv tillage then no till average between corn and beans


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## mlappin

PaMike said:


> Anyone ever do a comparison in fuel costs in tillage vs no till? I guess with "cheap fuel" now the differance isnt as great but back when diesel was $3/gallon no till yields could suffer some and you would still be dollars ahead...
> 
> I know, no farmer likes to give up yields, but when fuel is expensive it might make sense..


Haven't compared fuel costs lately, but I do know since going to no-till the hours on the tractors are a LOT lower. Back in the day when everything was worked I'd have at least 8-10 55 gallon drums of used oil waiting to be burned up in the waste oil burner, since going to no-till, I ran out of waste oil three weeks ago and have had the wood boiler going since.

The first 2 or 3 years your yields may suffer a little, but after that ours have done nothing but go up. Even last year as wet as it was, we had what were would consider half a yield, was still better than those around us that still did conventional tillage. No-till won't work if you always have to be the first to start or the first done, it requires some patience.


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## endrow

It is just so much different in Minnesota. It is very suitable to tillage there .In areas i farm it is not tillage friendly. Back when I was a kid in school we practiced all conventional tillage. We used to always say for every day you plowed it took 3 days to pick up the stones and rocks. Everyone in our family remembers days and days on end working on those ridges and Ledges where you just tore up tons of rocks. Picking up stones and rocks as heavy as you could carry , walking plowed ground carring them and lifting them up to the back of an old dump wagon.. many people in these areas pick stones for days on end. A year ago I had to have both hips replaced. I remember going in for the consult surgeon said for a guy that has never been overweight all his life. Your hips look like some guy that was toting around about three to three and a quarter. Yes, I did it I said oh I got some ideas how...... in areas like this no-till was an overnight success, some of those smaller stones would always get in the combine doing beans the Trap couldn't get them all. No one misses bars on the feeder housing .Bent vanes or elephant ears in the rotor tube. Bent up straw walkers.... getting a half of 5 gallon bucket of snaped in pieces guards from the flex head and running them into the shop and Welding them back together. 4 Haylage we NEVER raked a new seeding. You would not believe what a couple of those tennis ball-sized Goonies could do to a set of harvester knives..... many guys who will custom Bale corn fodder square or round. No one is interested in baling corn fodder in tilled ground you're on your own... in the fields are so much nicer and firmer to drive across. ....


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## PaMike

swmnhay said:


> just some rough figures for my operation.
> 
> Conv tillage
> Inline ripper 1 gal per acre 1 pass in fall
> Field cultivate .40 gal per acre 1 pass in spring
> 12 x 30 planter .20 gal per acre
> 
> No till
> Burn down pass with sprayer.10 gal per acre
> 12 x 30 planter . 20 gal per acre for corn
> 20 ft no till drill .60 gal per acre
> 
> So for me it takes about 1 gal per acre more for Conv tillage then no till average between corn and beans


Wow, I would have thought the saving would be more. Interesting to see.


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## stack em up

PaMike said:


> Wow, I would have thought the saving would be more. Interesting to see.


It's not a lot in fuel savings, but much different in machinery costs. When doing our operating note for the year, we have to use the Iowa custom rates when figuring production. Can't remember exactly but I think deep ripping is maybe $20/acre, field cultivating is $15 or so. Spraying is $7. Those figures are from a survey they conduct taking in account fuel, maintenance, depreciation etc.


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## mlappin

PaMike said:


> Wow, I would have thought the saving would be more. Interesting to see.


Some fuel is saved, a lot of wear items are saved as well, not wearing chisel plow points, disc blades, field cultivator sweeps, etc out. Might have more wear on seed openers on planters with no-till compared to planting tilled ground. Replacing seed openers on the planter is a lot cheaper than replacing all the blades on a disc.


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## swmnhay

mlappin said:


> Some fuel is saved, a lot of wear items are saved as well, not wearing chisel plow points, disc blades, field cultivator sweeps, etc out. Might have more wear on seed openers on planters with no-till compared to planting tilled ground. Replacing seed openers on the planter is a lot cheaper than replacing all the blades on a disc.


And a JD notill drill costs ALOT to maintain also.Thats if a guy uses one,which alot of notillers do.

And you would have a burn down pass also with no till also.

Yea its cheaper to plant notill,but not as much difference as you would think.

Weeds are easier to control also with tillage in the mix along with the chems instead of only relying on the chems.

Not saying notill is a bad thing it just didnt work for me and my ground.

In my case i took a 10 bu hit on soybean yields on the ground i notilled compared to conv tillage.I did some of each for 5-6 yrs.This yr the farms that i had been notilling and went back to conv tillage were within 1 bu of each other.


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## mlappin

Agreed, no-till drills aren't cheap to maintain, neither is the 400hp articulated we used to pull a 25' chisel plow.

I takes very little fuel thru our 4-175 White to cover all our ground with a burndown pass, 60 foot boom at 9-10 mph gets a lot done in very little time with very little fuel burned.

Biggest savings is time and labor for no-till, yes it takes an extra burndown pass, I'm sure somebody probably made a 60' chisel plow for a Big Bud, not feasible here though, not gonna pull it at 10mph either.

Just depends on what you can make work for your area, another huge plus to no-till is less rocks to pick here.


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## endrow

Good point on the John Deere drill my 1590 just finished its sixth season. Probably does 1000 acres per year. Paid 50K for it 2011. Rebladed it twice, replace the cast iron seed boots once and just ordered a set of opener blades that will go on this winter. You are correct it is a fairly high maintenance item. Our somewhat Shale Ground wears drill parts a little bit faster than others. That's 3K and Hardware over the last six seasons. And I'm not including this winter you're contemplating replacing the gauge wheel bearings, closing wheel bearings and gauge wheel tires.


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## endrow

Different Strokes for different folks. no-till is King here 5 years ago in my neck of the woods. If you would look back all these guys that needed their name in print and grew the super duper test plots did them in conventional tillage because they thought that's what they do best now all the test plots and all the first trials in this area are done by no-till.


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## swmnhay

I will say that where I had a few acres of lighter soil the crops were better with notill.

And I agree rocks are less of a issue with notill.


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## skyrydr2

Rocks......how i hate rocks...they ruin everything,get stuck in the seed feeders.. jam up the sod cutters...beat your a $$ to death rototilling between rows....and i stripped my plot and screened it.. i couldnt even imagine pulling a 25'drill here.. it would be rubble in an hour lol. Funny thing is you go west of where i am 8 miles and you cant find a stone...or good water... so it isnt easy in NewEngland especially central Mass


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## mlappin

endrow said:


> Good point on the John Deere drill my 1590 just finished its sixth season. Probably does 1000 acres per year. Paid 50K for it 2011. Rebladed it twice, replace the cast iron seed boots once and just ordered a set of opener blades that will go on this winter. You are correct it is a fairly high maintenance item. Our somewhat Shale Ground wears drill parts a little bit faster than others. That's 3K and Hardware over the last six seasons. And I'm not including this winter you're contemplating replacing the gauge wheel bearings, closing wheel bearings and gauge wheel tires.


Ground definitely makes a difference, we could get hundreds and hundreds of acres out of a set of plow points on our clay, in town on the coarse sand they might be changing points every day or two.


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## swmnhay

mlappin said:


> Ground definitely makes a difference, we could get hundreds and hundreds of acres out of a set of plow points on our clay, in town on the coarse sand they might be changing points every day or two.


Pretty common for guys to lift up a ripper when going over a sand hill here.They are glacial deposits.Some might be a 50' circle or a few acres.

I replace more from a broken tip from a rock then wearing out.


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## r82230

It appears Swmn has a lot more topsoil than I have here in Michigan (Glacier's must have left most of it there, just deposited the stones in my part of Michigan). If I was to til any more than 8-10 inches (or less in some spots), I would be bringing up sub soil.

One of the biggest things that I have noticed going to no-till, is my welding / torch work has drastically reduced. As a matter of fact, I am so out of practice welding, my welds now look worst than bird droppings.  I have not refilled my acetylene l / oxygen tanks in years (the gas could even be spoiled for I know). :lol:

No-till most likely is not a 'fix all', but in my area it works and saves a lot of steel (as Mlap mentions changing plow points, often). And as Enrow, says, 3 days of picking might be on the light side or real long days even (seems in my area the rocks are very proficient at breeding/multiplying anyhow). I would almost bet, there are NO stone houses in Swnm's neck of the woods, like we have here in Michigan (and Michigan had plenty of trees to use for building purposes).

Larry


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## swmnhay

It's not all this good but gives you and idea what the bottoms are like.Repairing a 10" clay tile line thats prly over 100 yrs old.


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## stack em up

My uncles fixed some clay tile about 20 years ago. It was 10" like yours, probably 24" deep. Hand laid. Good Lord they had dedication and perseverance back then. Our tile guy now hates it when he has to fuel the ditcher!


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## FarmerCline

swmnhay said:


> It's not all this good but gives you and idea what the bottoms are like.Repairing a 10" clay tile line thats prly over 100 yrs old.


 I still can't get over how black and rich looking your soil is.....no wonder corn yields so much better up there than down here. I can't imagine digging the trenches by hand to lay the tile. I take it your soils are pretty mellow and easy to get a shovel in the ground? Here unless you go out right after a rain when the ground is wet it's difficult to get a shovel in the ground more than 4-5 inches. Our soils are very hard and tight when not wet.


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## swmnhay

FarmerCline said:


> I still can't get over how black and rich looking your soil is.....no wonder corn yields so much better up there than down here. I can't imagine digging the trenches by hand to lay the tile. I take it your soils are pretty mellow and easy to get a shovel in the ground? Here unless you go out right after a rain when the ground is wet it's difficult to get a shovel in the ground more than 4-5 inches. Our soils are very hard and tight when not wet.


It does pack especialy if worked wet.Most of it is a silty-clay-loam.With the clay in it it will pack.


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## PaMike

We have an old clay tile line that runs from a spring in the field, across the road and into our basement. It then flows out of the basement into a ram pit where it was pumped up to the barn. The excess water goes down to the creek. We just replaced 20 ft of line that was collapsed from when the township installed a sewerline under the tile line in 1960. Its truly hard to believe that all those lines were hand dug with a pick and shovel...


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## mlappin

My grandfather was orphaned as a child, one of his older brothers took care of him. Anyways, when they came to this area grandfather worked for a turkey farm, once chores were done if enough daylight was left they'd go out and hand install tile, took three guys, one guy actually digging, another handing shovels out of the trench to a third guy scraping the dirt off em.

We have some tiles in the area that were installed with horses and a slip shoe.


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## stack em up

mlappin said:


> We have some tiles in the area that were installed with horses and a slip shoe.


We have one in the grove but couldn't for the life of me think of the name slip shoe, thanks!


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## r82230

swmnhay said:


> It does pack especialy if worked wet.Most of it is a silty-clay-loam.With the clay in it it will pack.


How many feet of top soil do you have, before you hit subsoil in your area? Nice looking ground by the way and not a rock in sight, wow.

Larry


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## swmnhay

mlappin said:


> My grandfather was orphaned as a child, one of his older brothers took care of him. Anyways, when they came to this area grandfather worked for a turkey farm, once chores were done if enough daylight was left they'd go out and hand install tile, took three guys, one guy actually digging, another handing shovels out of the trench to a third guy scraping the dirt off em.
> 
> We have some tiles in the area that were installed with horses and a slip shoe.


Never heard of a slip shoe,what does it do.Got a pic?

I have a couple old tile tools.A spade that has a cutting edge then 3 strips up to the foot part.And a tool to clean the bottom of the trench.I'll try to get some pics.


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## swmnhay

r82230 said:


> How many feet of top soil do you have, before you hit subsoil in your area? Nice looking ground by the way and not a rock in sight, wow.
> 
> Larry


It varies 1-4' usually.

We do have rocks.Some farms have more then others.Some are glacial deposits also.I try to go over every acre of corn ground with a rock picking crew.All the bean ground is rolled with a brillion roller after planting.I run around before planting with a skidloader and rock bucket to get the big ones.


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## stack em up

Most of the rocks around here are remnants from old railroad beds. Chicago/Northwestern were great at pulling rail up but leaving the ties and rocks...


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## mlappin

swmnhay said:


> Never heard of a slip shoe,what does it do.Got a pic?
> 
> I have a couple old tile tools.A spade that has a cutting edge then 3 strips up to the foot part.And a tool to clean the bottom of the trench.I'll try to get some pics.


No pics, couldn't find any on the internerd.

Bear with me, I've never seen one either just have Grandfathers description of it.

Like I said was pulled with horses, had a shoe on it the shape of the finished trench bottom to lay the tile in. Operator would get the team of horses heading in the right direction then drop the slip shoe, it might take a cut a few inches thick at most, once the shoe was full the operator would make a loop back along the trench and empty it, then make another loop to get back in line with the trench, drop the shoe again and make another pass, repeat until the trench is deep enough for the tile. Takes a good team of horse so the silly ass things step over the trench on the next pass instead of falling in. Least that was my understanding of the process, beat the crap out of hand digging.


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## stack em up

We actually have one in the grove my grandpa used to redirect a creek flow. I'll take some pictures of it.


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## glasswrongsize

Sounds like what we would have called a "slip scraper"- only narrower?


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