It has served us very well, even though it’s lighter duty than we want and actually only tills 54″. We were looking for one that tilled 60″ wide, and these seemed to cost between $2-4000 new. I found, also on Craig’s List, an unused tiller that tilled (allegedly) a 58″ swath and bought it. The most important may have been the rototiller. This past winter, knowing that we were moving our farm to a new location, we were faced with what seemed like a tidal wave of necessary and expensive purchases. Nevertheless, for the time saved and the way it works our ground so deeply, I’d heartily recommend the mini-chisel to anyone farming on this scale. It also can get clogged with debris if it’s working ground that has a lot of weeds or vegetable matter still residing in it. In one part of our field, the chisel left the field so cloddy, that we ended up having to make two passes with the tiller.
They also leave furrows, requiring us to till more deeply on our tillage pass to get a smooth, even surface. They require more horsepower than the spader and good traction, so they won’t work well in our wet springs. The chisel plow does have a few drawbacks. It would take us 3-4 hours to spade an acre, but only an hour to chisel it. The greatest virtues of mini-chisel plows are that they are really inexpensive ($1000 new, $300 used), they loosen soil deeper than the spader, they are very sturdy, and the faster you go the better they work. It also doubled as a great way to incorporate old vegetables back into the bed once we were done harvesting them. So we bought it.Īs it turned out, from August until the end of the year, we used the mini-chisel in place of the spader for all of our deep-tillage bed prep work. “Siri,” I said reluctantly, “looks like we have to buy a spader now too.” It was relatively inexpensive for a spader ($3000) and tilled a 60″ width… exactly what we would have been looking for, had we been in the market for a spader. This spring, while I was perusing Craig’s List for farm equipment, I found one for sale and hung my head. It’s positive attributes are that it doesn’t require a lot of horsepower or traction, it works better than anything else we know of at turning and aerating wet soil, and it doesn’t harm the soil structure by pulverizing or inverting it. The three drawbacks of spaders, that we’ve found, are that their operating speed is very slow (1 mph or less), they are delicate, finicky tools that can be difficult to fix when they break, and they are really really expensive (like $10k or more new). Right now, we think that 10-12 acres might be the right size (though… ask me in two years, and I’ll probably have a different opinion).Īs far as our choice of implements for making beds, we are very happy with these three tools.įor the Pacific Northwest, the spader is surely the best tool out there for working soil in our wet springs.
#HOBBY FARM TRACTOR PLUS#
We want to be big enough to support our family plus the families of our workers, but small enough that what we do each day can still be called farming and not managing. We are constantly thinking about what the best size is for our farm. Our experience, however, has been shaped by a gradual recognition that in order to make our business financially sustainable, we have to farm more acres than can be worked solely by human power. Many people are drawn to the idea of small-scale agriculture because it relies much more on human-power and less on internal combustion horse-power.
I really love thinking about systems and the equipment that makes them most efficient, so this year was especially fun for me. Should we change the length of our beds? Should we squeeze more rows per bed? Fewer? How should we best manage nutrients and fertility? What tools will we use to make our system work best? One of the funnest parts about moving our farm to our new property is that we got the opportunity to rethink everything about how we had been farming.
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