Chisel Plowing Corn Fields On A Small Dairy Farm!

That's how we put the duels on. So we got two, three boards underneath there, roughly a little bit more than we need to get the squat out. And then when we get the duel up against, we just adjust the tractor so it starts to come off the boards just enough so that the hole is centered. So you got 10 bolts, and then we use that long bar to kind of readjust just enough to get them started and then air wrench them on. So I used to use the floor jack underneath the draw bar. I'd still put it on a block, but then I'd use that to get the fine height. But when there's two people, it works better this way. And then we use that long bar. Yep. So there's mounting the duels. So we're going to go do some chisel plowing. It's middle of November. It's very cold out here. I think we're going to get some frozen ground tonight. It's 70 and 810. There you see my stack of boards. Anyway, I got to get this pallet out of the way. I got these dust covers here. We had trouble with this a few days ago, but it looks like I'm going to have to blow that out before I shove them in there, put them in the toolbox. So one more thing I wanted to show you guys. So I built these pallets and it's just two inch oak planking, lots of screws, four by fours on the ends. It's just kind of the scraps from better stuff, but some of the leftovers from some of the projects we had, but I built like several of those for the duels. And then you get your pallet fork. So it's set as widest and I can stack them, a set of duels on there. Then I got another one for the 1066, which those can get stacked on top of these duels, you know, for storage in the shed. So that works very nice. So then we're able to use the pallet fork at skids here to kind of move stuff around. And instead of trying to roll them all the time, I think that corn head that I bought, that's gonna, if we're real wide, we're gonna make something like that, probably a little bit longer so that I can use the pallet fork to move it. I gotta make sure I can lift it first, but I'm thinking it'll work because the combine may not always be here on this property right here. So then if I have to move it, I can. So let's go get some plowing done. The Dwight's Alice chisel plow, that's a seven shank. It's always an odd number. Plowing could be better in the spring for getting your soils opened up. The soil seems to work up a lot nicer. It breaks up real nice and makes a better seed bed. Most springs, anyway. It isn't always true. Not every spring is the same, of course, but I think the theory is is your soils kind of settle out better. Otherwise it's kind of wet down underneath and it's sealed up. And your soils warm up a lot faster in the springs, too. That's probably one of the bigger reasons that you're able to plant sooner. I think you get a better catch with your seed and everything. A lot of this no-till farming has gotten where it's got its advantages and its disadvantages. It just seems like it doesn't take off. See, now this cylinder's got like a valve on here instead of, for a lock. Kind of like this. Like a real heavy faucet. I've been keeping this machine in the shed as much as I can, but it's probably not nearly as important as some. And then I got these here. These are spacers. I'll show you how these work. See, they kind of got like a spring piece on two halves. And they come in different sizes. So your ram, which is this part, this one here is actually for a smaller cylinder. I even had to make a piece to get the right adjustment in there. And you got this chunk here that's welded on. So these are all able to slide. This one's behind. So that's like in the storage spot. My bush hog's kind of got that same type of stuff. That's how we adjust our height on a machine like this. There's an awful lot of down pressure on something like this. It's trying to pull itself into the ground. So just to explain the rest of this, so now you got these straight coulters. And then these bars in the back, that's to keep this area cleaned out from trash and mud or whatever might start building there. And that's to cut your stock and your roots and whatever you might be chiseling so it doesn't ball up so much. The two halves, and then you got this big area here. That's like a big spring in case it would hit a rock or something. Then you got adjustment in here and you got this thread rod. So you'd be loosening these bolts and adjusting it up and down depending on how deep you want to go. So typically when we set it down, we put our tractor in float, which means our cylinder doesn't hold it up or down. It just can float in and out as the machine goes over a hump or something like that as far as that's concerned. It just won't let it only go so deep is all. And then you got your shank there. They're reversible. So here's what it's supposed to look like. And you see how it's worn off, which I don't know, maybe next year I'll have to turn them all around. So you just got two bolts holding that on. And then you got these big springs up here and there's like a hinge in here so that if you'd hit like a large rock or a stump or my goodness, anything really, it's able to back up or flip upward instead of breaking it or putting so much shock on everything else. So sometimes you can see these things doing a little vibrate, little flex going. So there's seven of those and that's pretty much how that is. And then I'll show you guys my corn head too. I don't know if Aaron talked about this. 944, so it's a four row wide. So I believe it's 38 inches. Now someone has asked us about my corn picker. My corn picker is 40 inches. So the original wide rows were 40 inches. And I think that theory was for cultivating with horses, you needed a reasonably wide row to get through. And of course they never had nearly as many acres as today. And it gets so choked up about yields and all that stuff. It's just, they wanted something that worked. And then there's Aaron's combine with the six row narrow. So usually narrow row, they'll come six. This is four. So it's a little bit narrower than the six row. It would be, I think like five of these rows would be equivalent to a six row narrow to get an extra row in there. And it's all about yields and stuff. But being that we don't have a lot, a lot of corn for acres, I don't believe we're gonna get that far ahead by trying to go all narrow. And then the stripping plates, which are these things, that's something a corn picker doesn't have. And there's reasons for that too. They were put on new, and I don't think more than 10 acres went through those stripping plates so far. So the head's in very good shape, just hasn't been in the shed a lot, which may not matter. But they claim a lot of the parts from this would fit the narrow row heads too. It's kind of a good that way too. It's just the frame of it all is for wide row. And that's where I wanna get this pallet made so that we can get this thing up off the ground, at least be able to move it when we need to. So anyway, let's get chiseling. Tractor should be very warmed up by now. It's very cold out here. We got snow flurries in the air. Perfect tillage weather for fall. So we got this triangle to do here, about two acres or so. And we got that strip to do there, and then across the creek, another strip. It'll be a little bit turning around, but we'll get her. It hasn't really rained a whole lot in a long time. I mean, it's been raining, but it's a bit slower. The shovel seems to throw the soil right into the fence. And again, so it buries some of the trash, it helps mow faster. So now we'll be manuring this this winter. So I like to really hug the edges good. They have wasteland, pretty heavy soil down here. So the corn was just picked off of here. The corn stalks were rolling the soil almost into the fence. So then you get that kind of a ledge there afterwards. But, so that's good, because there's always spots in the field that are like that, and it's like back in the 80s, everybody did fall tillage. All the farmers, they took their crops off, and before Thanksgiving, you had all that done. Yeah, so back in the 80s, when we were plowed, a little bit of chiseling in the fall. So all the corn down, so most of your farm was in hay and pastures and that. And it wasn't quite as such a big deal about worrying about erosion and all that and over tilling the soils. We didn't have the disease pressures like we got today. And there's so much more stuff we're dealing with that didn't even exist back then for various reasons. When you plow the soil, turn it over, you kind of bury all that, the trash and stock and stuff that harbors all those bugs. So that's kind of the theory. But what I see going on today is that the farmers that are still out there doing crops are less of them, and they're handling more acres, and it would be almost impossible to ridiculous to see them trying to move or plow whatever they did with their row crops. So even though maybe a little bit would probably benefit them a lot, it takes a lot of different opinions on this. So here, if it wasn't heavy bottoms and it wasn't corn on corn, you can do that because we just don't have a lot of flat ground to start with. So we do use our bottoms for corn. When it works, the corn always looks good. So according to this, we're going 5.6 miles an hour, which is good.