Published April 21, 2008 | By admin
Answering Another Question from the Field
Question from the field: “Why did we design the 1tRIPr shank to look like it does?”
Orthman replies: Tillage tools that are to disrupt compaction in soils have traditionally been thought to need to explode and churn the soil upwards towards the soil surface to discontinue the laminar development and the negative soil restrictions.
Creating gaps, cracks and voids supposedly so water will penetrate the soil profile with ease is the thought and this is to hopefully allow roots to extend deeper into the soil. With a semi-parabolic shank design much akin to the ripper/subsoilers of the past three decades, compacted layers are engaged, shattered and rolled up the shank in a tumbling action with maximum disruption to the soil profile in a V-shaped fashion. However this can create large clods from fist sized to near table-top sized fragments and large voids depending upon soil moisture conditions and thickness of the compacted zone. Generally speaking, a subsequent tillage or packing action must follow to break up the explosion of clods, soil surface roughness, to keep the soil from drying out too much and ready for a seedbed.
The Orthman 1tRIPr shank is developed to disrupt the zone of compaction with a better “underground†result. To shatter, lift but not roll soil from the subsurface to the soil surface with clods of large size, and prepare the seedbed/root zone. We recommend when a grower determines where the zone of compaction lies in the soil profile, to insert the 1tRIPr ½ to 1 inch below the bottom of that soil layer and drive 5 to 6 mph and Get ‘Er Done. Exploding soil too much in the Western Corn Belt has taught us that soil moisture is like gold, maintaining all that we can in the soil profile grows crops when rainfalls rarely exceed 10 inches during a growing season (April 15 to Sept. 15). It is our observance that massive disturbance to the soil to breakup soil compaction can be waste of water, time, fuel and time.
Doing tillage with precision as does a surgeon with his/her scalpel, we at Orthman are about Precision Tillage for the betterment of growing crops.