"Watch the field behind the plow turn to straight, dark rows
Feel the trickle in your clothes, blow the dust cake from your nose
Hear the tractor's steady roar, Oh you can't stop now
There's a quarter section more or less to go" Stan Rogers, Field Behind the Plow
Today the weather was very good and I was finally able to start plowing. A couple of years ago I picked up a great plow at an auction. It was exactly what I needed, but I didn't go to the auction looking for a plow. What I went for was a haybine. I was the only bidder on our plow and got a great deal as a result. Part of the reason why I got a great deal is that plowing is going out of fashion in agriculture. Major cash croppers have all moved into what is known as no till farming, and may run a set of discs over corn stubble, but that's it. If they do plow, its usually with a very big 5 or 6 furrow plow. Ours is a 3 furrow plow- its in between a competition sized or a full scale production sized plow. Plowing competitions are quite a serious business, but I'll never enter one. All I care about is that what starts as turf ends up as dirt.
Our plow is a 3 furrow Overum auto-reset plow. It was made in Sweden. The Scandinavians design their plows differently than North American companies and I feel their design is superior. What is most notable is that they have longer mould boards (the part that turns the turf over so that the grass is buried and the roots are exposed to the air). Longer mould boards means that as you plow it is more like you are folding the dirt over instead of breaking it up. The other major advantage is that the Scandinaian plows are auto reset, which in our case means it has pneumatic cylinders so that when the plow hits a rock, instead of getting caught and pulling back on the tractor (which can be dangerous) the pneumatic cylinder compresses allowing the plow to skip over the rock and then slam back into the furrow, all in the blink of an eye. This is very important at Hill Giant farm because we have lots of rocks. In fact, they're our only guaranteed crop.
Today I was plowing 7 acres at our neighbors place. Most of his land is mature reforested pine or low lying wetland. But the 7 acres he has is comparatively flat to our place and remarkably free of stones (a rarity in northern Grey County). Lots of farm land around our place is rented and worked by 2 big cash crop operations or by a multi-generation dairy operation. No one is interested in working up only 7 acres. So, in exchange for letting him hunt on our land, I get 7 more acres to work up. The reason we still plow is because we are going to work this field up in 2012 and won't need to work it up again for 10 years. I cut hay off this field this year and it was patchy and weedy. If I plow the field now and let the frost and winter kill the existing roots in the spring I can disc-harrow, spread manure, and sow grain and hay. The grain will grow and provide cover for the grasses and legumes which make up the hay. When it is time to harvest the grain there will be some hay in the straw which the sheep will pick out and eat. Two years from now the hay that was planted the year before will be well established and be cut dried and baled up.
On our farm we add grazing animals to the rotation. The sheep graze a field for years and fertilize it, then I plow it up and sow it with grain and hay, cut hay for years, then its back to sheep grazing.
Here is a video. Remember, I am still new at this.
