17 December 2020

Soil preparation: crushing stones

Today we bring you another of the tasks of soil preparation to have a good seed bed is the removal of the stones ... especially on fields where these stones are abundant.  

In this sense, the farmer can choose one of two options: to pick the stones and leave them on a border of the field or to choose the option of crushing them, which is the case here. If we choose to collect the stones, the advantage is that the soil is not altered in any way in terms of the contribution that the crushed stone can make to the soil, but that the stones form cairns which are usually places where rabbits live (this can be a serious problem). If we choose to crush stones, it is often said that the contribution generated by the ground stone can impoverish the qualities of the soil... In our case we have ground the stone and we have not noticed any loss in the yield of the plot. 

Some years ago we published a post where we talked about these crushing works as you can see here. On this occasion we visited our friend Jose Angel to see his TMC Cancela machine as you can see in our video and photos. This machine has been designed for surface work with medium-powered tractors, making it ideal for farmers who do not make super-intensive use of the machine. TMC Cancela has other models for more intensive use but already requires high power tractors and in our area they are not the usual ones. 

Before the stone is crushed, it is essential that the stones are on the surface so that the machine can work faster. Cereal seed drill is used for this purpose. A first task is to use the seed drill which lifts all the stones thanks to its flexible arms and leaves them on the surface. Once this work is done, the machine that will crush the surface stones. You have to think about these works before doing them if they are really necessary, since the price you have to pay for them is around 90 €/h. The efficiency of the machine depending on the amount of stone to be crushed and the working depth. 

Versión en español.


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