XTill offers effective post drought tillage
Cultivation following one the driest summers on record could be made easier using strip till technology. This, suggests Vogelsang’s Andy Hayhurst, has brought renewed interest in the company’s XTill, a strip till machine that can be used with and without slurry incorporation. “Strip till offers the opportunity to plant a variety of row crops with minimal soil disruption. This enables precious moisture to remain in the soil and be made more readily available to the establishing crop,” says Mr Hayhurst. There are seven models in the XTill range, starting at 4 rows and extending to 12. Built on a parallelogram frame, the XTill features coulter blades, star-notched disk blades and ridging disks to first cut and then establish a strip for the seed. A double press wheel forms the seed bed, and Vogelsang’s DosiMat precision distributors can be utilised to apply liquid manure. “In the still hard soils caused by this year’s drought, the XTill offers the opportunity to make fewer passes and plant crops more efficiently. More importantly, the method is less disruptive because the uncultivated land between the strips remains intact, protecting soil biology and leaving plant residues that help maintain soil structure,” he adds. The working width of the XTill extends up to 6 metres and row spacing can be adjusted from 45cm to 75cm using Vogelsang’s VarioCrop, a pneumatically pressurised system that enables precision planting at a constant tillage depth. This is coupled to a depth adjustment that provides nine depth settings that can be manually selected at the rear of the XTill to suit the crop being planted. “The stand out benefit of the XTill is its ability to incorporate slurry or digestate during the planting process. When fertiliser prices are so high, and it can be difficult to hit the best windows for planting, having the added benefit of natural fertiliser in the same pass creates substantial cost and time savings for any operator,” concludes Mr Hayhurst.
Source: industry press release.