2 August 2019- Stalk pullers in action

A neighbor up the road was pulling stalks with a rolling stalk puller mounted on the back of his Deere tractor... The two large disk blades run cutting together under the roots of the plant and cut them off and toss the rootballs in the air, killing the shredded off stalks. Mostly run in cotton and grain sorghum stubble after shredding then off with a bush hog to get rid of the plant material, since neither of those crops die after harvest or being bush hogged... This kills the stubble while leaving the bed mostly intact, which after hipping back up is ready for winter...

[@rongrose3746]

Never seen this before ? Interesting !

[@Greg_Gatsby]

That looks to me like a different version of the row cleaners I've seen mounted on some row crop planters. Am I anywhere close to right?

[@lukestrawwalker]

Basically a row cleaner in reverse... row cleaners kinda interlock (or nearly so depending how you set them up) and sweep stuff to either side. These are big disk blades about oh 24-30 inches in diameter, that pinch together just behind the bottom of the disks. They have little angle iron blades bolted on the backsides to keep them rolling so they don't "lock up" with stuff going between them. They center themselves on the row and then as its pulled through the field, the stubble goes between them, and it rips the soil and rootball/taproot of the plants right out of the ground, rooster-tails it up in the air, and it usually drops back down with the roots on the surface to kill the stubble. Corn and soybean stubble doesn't regrow; once it's harvested, it's DEAD. Grain sorghum and cotton, on the other hand, the stubble will stay alive and grow new tops (plants) until frost, which means they're putting on growth which supports bugs populations and allows them to store resources to survive the winter, making pest populations that much worse the following year. My old man learned that back in the 70's, when for awhile back then everybody got a 2 row pull-type crop shredder, and would pull a 2 row disk behind it in cotton to knock out their stalks and get the soil loosened up for lister bedding with a middlebuster plow. With a Ford 5000 or IH 560 or similar tractor back then, you could pull that at 6 mph easy and cover some ground. Even with a Farmall Super-M you could still run pretty fast and cover some ground. BUT you were burying green crop residue and the bugs along with it, which was basically putting them in the ground with a "buffet" of green crop residue, basically a "winter food supply" so the bug problems got a lot worse. Guys didn't do that long and went back to shredding, giving it about a week for the green material and stalks and stuff to roast in the scorching sun, which destroyed the nutritional value and usually fried any juvenile bugs or eggs in the residue, because of the super-hot temperatures on sun-scorched ground... THEN disk the field and chop up the residue and tear the beds up some to make it easier to plow afterwards. SO basically these things work almost identically to a planter's double-disk openers, BUT IN REVERSE... instead of two small disk blades back to back slicing open a furrow to drop seed into, it's two big disk blades running face-to-face pinching together to rip the rootballs out of the ground and fling them in the air to break the soil off the roots, and put the roots on the surface to dry out and die. Later! OL J R :)

[@SouthSaskFarmer1]

Now that's weird lol

[@lukestrawwalker]

It works good in row crops to terminate the stubble... cotton and grain sorghum continue to grow until freeze kills them unless you plow out the stubble, which destroys the beds and takes a lot of fuel and power. Some guys just install spray nozzles on the back of the shredder and band 2,4D down the top of the stubble behind the shredder (on cotton) to kill the stubble since we have plowup deadlines to meet to comply with boll weevil regulations (have to kill the stubble by a certain date-- 2,4D sprayed onto the freshly cut stubble kills it before it can even resprout, but of course does nothing for sorghum.) Corn and beans of course naturally senesce and die as they mature so that's not a problem. Rice stubble is of course drilled or broadcast and they usually just graze cattle on it because they fallow the fields after every rice crop the following year. The stalk pullers undercut the stubble and blades pinch together and rips out the taproot and throws it in the air in the rooster tail of dirt coming down behind the puller so the roots dry out and die immediately, even on sorghum with its "root balls" (no taproot like cotton). Then all you have to do is go back with a hipper and pull the dirt back up on the beds and you're laid by for the winter, most guys will plant straight into it the following spring. The only downside of this method is IMHO you can get a lot of buildup of soil diseases or root pathogens like wireworms or grub worms or rootworms or fungus like Rhizoctonia. Since the bed is never really "ripped open" and exposed to the sun and wind which kills or sets back a lot of that stuff. Back in the 70's when I was a little kid a bunch of guys used to pull a 2 row drag-type shredder behind a Farmall Super M with a 2 row tandem disk pulled directly behind the shredder. Dad bought one of those rigs from a guy who'd moved up to a bigger shredder and disk and he used it two years and then sold it for what he paid for it. I asked him about it years later because I was always taught to shred the stalks off with a bush-hog shredder, let the chopped up material dry out for a few days to a week or so, THEN put the tandem disk on and go disk the stalks down to cut the stubble and chop up the debris ahead of the middlebusters (plow). When I asked about it he said, "Yeah, pulling the disk behind the shredder SOUNDED like a good idea, BUT I never had more bug problems in my LIFE than those 2 years I did that... boll weevils were just horrible. What I realized was I was basically chopping up all the cotton stalks, leaves, and old bolls and squares and stuff with the shredder, and then DISKING IT IN with the disk IMMEDIATELY, so basically I was making a snug little home for the SOB's to live through the winter, complete with their own pre-stocked buffet and larder with all the fresh plant material disked under the soil! When I went back to shredding and letting all that stuff dry out and roast on the blazing hot ground in full sun for a week so it was all dry and crispy, by that point the weevils had moved on or died from roasting in the sun, and when I disked under the stubble there was nothing left "edible" to sustain them over winter..." I think that's right. Some guys have farted with no-till in this area on beds and planting straight back into the same bed-- basically with a stalk puller it's about as close as you can get to "no-till" (or poisoning the stubble behind the shredder with 2,4D and planting straight down the top of the bed next year into the same dead stubble) BUT that usually doesn't last too long before they eventually rip the field up and re-bed it... what happens is the soil fungi and microbes and pests build up in the soil right in the drill area where the next crop is planted, and since the soil is never inverted or broken up and allowed to dry out or roast in the sun the pests and pathogens just build up over time... SO then you have to spend a fortune on heavy doses of insecticide or seed treatments trying to beat off the seedling diseases or soil pests like rootworms or wire worms when if you'd plowed you'd have pretty much wiped them out "naturally". Diesel to run a plow is a HECK of a lot cheaper than heavy doses of insecticide and seed treatment to control disease... Later! OL J R :)