Through my involvement with the local grower group the Corrigin Farm
Improvement Group, I got to witness some fairly dramatic responses with
mouldboard ploughing on a neighboring property who was addressing non-wetting
soils and weed issues. So I attempted to replicate those results here by doing my
my own trials and found that we're getting quite large yield responses from
mouldboard ploughing, at the same time we're burying a problem weed seeds
herbicide resistant weeds at depth where they couldn't make it to the surface and
that was how we started this journey of mouldboard ploughing.
Back in 2013 we ploughed approximately 30 hectares. We ploughed some
heavier clay based soils and that created some establishment issues.
However on the right soils that year we saw some dramatic responses in both
yield and also weed control. So from there that really gave me the confidence
to invest in my own plough. I made contact with a machinery dealer in England and
arranged a plough to be shipped out in a shipping container with parts and that
cost me approximately twenty thousand dollars all up. Had I bought a new plough
in Australia, equivalent size player would have been around $70,000.
This is the mouldboard plough which imported from the UK second hand I think
I got a pretty good buy it's a seven-run machine some key
features of this player which are important the skimmer plate here which
pushes the very top layer the top soil which contains the weed seeds into the
bottom of the furrow which is created by the main board and the small plate on
the end of the main board which helps totally invert that top soil to 30
centimetres. The other important thing about this plow is these hydraulic brake
arms. We've got rocks and stumps below the surface and that means these boards
can break out and return to their position once they hit an obstacle.
Yeah so done our own trials here comparing mouldboard ploughing to untreated,
and also deep ripping and over a number of years and on average we achieve
between 800 and 900 kilograms a hectare yield response in the first year however
those yield responses continue on and we've found that we're still getting
responses after three or four years so the benefits really continue more than one year.
So we like to monitor how we're modifying the soil profile and one way
to do that is to to dig a soil pit and we can share these results with our
farming peers in their local area.
In the soil pit here we see an example of the effect
of mouldboard ploughing where the topsoil is buried at 20 to 30 centimetres.
In that top soil are the weed seeds which unlikely to make it to
the surface from that depth. The new topsoil is now formerly the subsoil
which has higher clay content in it and is wettable. The other interesting thing
here is the topsoil is more acidic than the subsoil so we always apply lime
prior to burying that topsoil and below this layer here we have the subsoil
which includes a mixture of gravel and clay,
which is quite a nice subsoil for root growth.
There are challenges we've come across with mouldboard ploughing and some of these
include crop establishment. Mouldboard ploughing creates a very soft seed bed so
we can bury seeds to deep in the seeding process. To address that we've
been very careful where we place our seed but also increased our our seeding rates
by about 20%. The other issue is top soil has low organic matter levels and being
soft as well we have run into herbicide damage. The other challenge we've come
across is the on our gravelly shallow gravelly soils it's very hard on our
mouldboard plough with the ripping action, so we're now looking at using a
different machine on those soil types.
Okay it's an alternative to the mouldboard plough for top soil inversion is to use a one-way disc-plough.
This needs to be modified to increase the breakout so we can use a much larger disc than this
the original disc. To do this we remove the hub of every second arm and connect
these two arms together we do that right along the machine and brace the rest of
the machine for extra strength and that does a similar job to the mouldboard plough.
Mouldboard ploughing is quite a slow process, we do about three hectares an hour
so it's a longer-term project to cover 70% of the farm. At the moment we've done
about a third of the property. It's important that the soil profile is wet
before you mouldboard plough. So it means that we need to wait for good rains or
we do the ploughing on chemical fallowed country where we know we've got moisture.
So summarising this I found that the mouldboard plough is probably the most
suitable machine for this property for a majority of the soil types to address a
key soil constraint here which is non-wetting soils. We'll continue
to mouldboard plough across the farm until we've done all the suitable soil
types but at the same time we're looking at other soil amelioration operations
such as deep ripping and the one-way modified plough.
Go to the description bar below for the latest information links and resources.