The Tilmor Story with Lydell Steiner

[@herbhouston5378]

Great video! Beautiful place and incredible people! Both lines of equipment are at the top of their field! The philosophy of you and your family and the businesses you have is like a breath of fresh air!

[@reidallaway]

Fantastic work on Tilmor products to date and looking forward to seeing more of these tractors in the landscape. So nice to see a family-owned and farm-based manufacturing business excelling at providing excellent, efficiency-boosting equipment for other farmers.

[@LK382]

Love your story.

[@skd5432]

Hi Lydell,any plans to start up Tilmor in India!/

[@atcfisherman]

Awesome tractor. Do you have a dealer in southeast Texas?

[@totallyjonesin]

What about the EPA regs?

[@TilmorProducts]

Our engine options and fuel tanks meet EPA requirements.

[@redddbaron]

Now design a round bale unroller and we are good! I developed a way to organic no till using mulch using roundbales and paper instead of black plastic..

[@johncraftenworth7847]

Hey Red Baron, they have 3 pt mounted bale unrollers out there already, many cattlemen use them to bring hay to cattle and make it easy for them to eat it, but the unrollers should work for transplants as well. There are many different makers out there so you'll need to do a google and/or a craigslist search in your area.

[@redddbaron]

I unroll a paper weed barrier under my hay. it gets pretty thick. But it is a way better system than black plastic from the biophysical because no need to till or plow at all. However need equipment designed to be able to do large acres.

[@johncraftenworth7847]

I think a large round bale will unroll to cover a 100 ft garden rowlike 5 ft wide too. For your system you'd need a roll of your paper, it'd probably work to dispense it on one of those plastic laying machines if you could find a roll of the paper that was the right dimensions and strong enough not to tear at slower tractor speeds, and I think the layers are adjustable to accomodate rolls of different widths. Then you could roll out the paper first, it would be slightly buried by dirt on the edges cuz that's what the plastic layers normally do to plastic, that should keep it from blowing away on you if it's windy. Then you could come over the top of the paper with the large hay bale unroller on a second pass. I think it'd work, so I'd say the equipment exists now to do what you want, though not on one pass. That's probably not possible anyway because hay/paper combo bales don't exist lol

[@redddbaron]

I know the equipment doesn't exist to do it on one pass! LOLS That's what I just said. I need it developed! And dirt is not an option. I never have any bare soil ever. Not ever. No herbicides no plows no tillers no nada nothing. Just unroll the paper and unroll the hay over it. Sizes I have. Hay round bales come in both 4 and 5 foot widths. I use the 4. and there is commercial paper in 48" in rolls way over 1000 feet. It can be done, but now I simply do it by hand, unrolling the paper just ahead of the hay by 2-3 feet or less.

[@johncraftenworth7847]

yeah I guess they could make a hay bale unroller that also has a rack for paper unroller, that would unroll the paper slightly ahead of the hay. One problem I foresee is that I think the hay needs to grip on the ground to unroll well, so on paper it might want to slide and not unroll. But maybe if the hay roll was slightly wider than the paper roll, that gap would allow the hay to grip on the ground an unroll. It's an interesting idea. I've seen permaculture gardeners who use paper and cardboard covered by straw or unpacking straw and hay bales. Seems like a nice natural alternative to plastic mulching. I did plastic mulching one year with my dad over a decade ago, never again! Stuff tears, gets into tatters, winds up in the soil, in the tree wind breaks, what a mess! Now they claim they have plastics made of corn starch that are supposed to break down. I still didn't like the drip tape, I want the option of sprinklers and natural rainfall. Saw a youtube that BASF designed some plastic mulch with perforated holes to allow overhead rain and moisture down to the plants, as well as being biodegradable. Now that caught my attention but I haven't seen it for sale anywhere. Your method is nice because the most important component can be created or purchased locally in any agricultural region, so nothing really to buy or ship in, and you're not dependent on any big company. And straw or hay mulch is quite tidy and beautiful in a market garden :) I'm working on 1/3rd acre so it's actually feasable to use woven landscape fabric and transplant into that, so that's what I'm doing. I like it much better than the solid plastic mulch for sure.