Sweeps designed for longevity

07 Mar Sweeps designed for longevity

We are seeing a drive in Europe and North America around different mechanical tillage systems to try to combat herbicide resistance (plants becoming resistant to the effectiveness of spray chemicals.)

Typically, these are inter-row weeding machines with RTK GPS guidance and are most used in maize and beet crops, on organic produce farms mechanical disturbance of weeds is the main way of dealing with weed burden.

 One of the ways to do this & not just in Organic Vegetable farming is to use, NON-CHEMICAL ‘weeding techniques. 

Issue being when you move to inter-row systems these mechanical inter-row weeding machines, the ground engaging parts end up doing a lot of passes at a reasonable working speed, a recipe for high wear rates.

In sweet corn & maize whether organic or non-organically grown there is big benefits in inter-row tillage to disturb soil crust that can form from heavy rain and capping of the soil. You start inter-row tillage 3 passes x in 200 hectares of maize or sweet corn it’s a lot of wear, plus blunt sweeps aren’t doing much to help as they just drag weeds through the soil.

To solve this problem Boehlerit, a specialist Austrian company working with tungsten have developed with special range of sweeps with specialist tungsten carbide cutting edges.

The main benefits being.

• Increase of tool life up to 10 tines compared to conventional boron steel sweeps.
• Designed for optimum working quality and high wear protection, plus No smear layer formation in heavy soils.
• Constant working width of the sweep until the end of tool life.
• Carbide tip positioned lower than conventional sweeps for better soil penetration.   

Some interesting quotes from the 6 steps to halt herbicide resistant weeds.

Even in the USA the home of genetically modified roundup ready crops herbicide resistance is growing.

• “A great man once said, you can’t solve problems created with a herbicide by using another herbicide.”
• Midwestern farmers soon struggled with glyphosate-resistant weeds. “Mother Nature always wins”.
• In the USA, Roundup Ready corn was one of the biggest technologies ever, but it did have one bad side effect,”. “It made us lazy.”

Call us on 0800 894 171 or email sales@groundgear.co.nz for more information.