DEEP PLOUGHING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 April 1940, Page 9

DEEP PLOUGHING

ADVANTAGE FOR MANGOLDS. Extensive experimental work carried out recently in England has shown that for the majority of crops deep ploughing offers few advantages—if any. The cost of going down a few extra inches is considerable, and is not warranted, says a report, but an exception was shown in the case of mangolds. In ploughing no apparent ad’vantage has been obtained in going to a depth greater than four inches for cereals, but for mangolds a depth of eight inches is advantageous. Ploughing and harrowing prepared a seed bed as well as, and often belter, than the use of cultivators, continues the report. Rotary cultivation was not as effective as the standard methods of ploughing and harrowing, whether for roots or cereals, but it was better than the cultivator alone. Rotary cultivation, however, appeared to encourage those kinds of weeds that grew from fragments. In the tests of standard operations the results from an extensive series of inter-row cultivation experiments had been able to show that stirring the land beyond the minimum required to keep down weeds and prevent capping on soils where this was prone to occur was useless labour at the best, and might even reduce cro|J yields.