Using subcompact tractor and maintaining soil health?

Hi all -- I'm hoping to get some advice here. We have a TYM subcompact tractor with several farm attachments (tiller, plow, potato digger etc...). I've only ever farmed about a 400 square foot plot on raised beds and used a no-till method, in part because I farmed in the mountains of Western NC on sloped ground and so implements were not an option. Now I have about 3,000 sq feet of garden space alone (5.5 acres total minus house site) on very flat former cow pasture. The soil is amazing. Having said that, I want to protect the soil and I am trying to figure out how damaging (and therefore if I should use) the use of my sub compact tractor will be. I've read several studies on large heavy farm equipment and soil compaction, but very little on sub-compact tractors and compaction. We all know why soil compaction is bad, so I won't bother detailing here, but I'd love advice on how to use the efficiency gains of my little tractor while still abiding permaculture principles. Any help is truly appreciated.

Welcome!  What do you want to grow? What is your current location?  Lots of folks here use no till methods for vegetable gardening with great results.  This usually includes heavy applications of organic mulches.  

Hi Sarah,

Welcome to Permies.

I have a JD 2210.  I still use raised beds for vegetables in general.  This year I am going to try to expand a little by planting larger plots of sunflowers and corn.  In general, my approach is that the less I use my tractor on my garden, the better.

Sarah Beth, welcome to the forum!

While I feel a tractor has many uses on a farm maybe the garden is not the best place.

Though it is good for moving wood chips in the garden.

This is from a book that you or others might find interesting:

Roberto said, "Those methods are simply described by the following four points:

1. Less soil disturbance
2. More plant diversity
3. Living roots as much as possible
4. Keep soil covered at all times

https://permies.com/t/136000/Soil-Owner-Manual-Jon-Sitka

Gray Henon wrote:Welcome!  What do you want to grow? What is your current location?  Lots of folks here use no till methods for vegetable gardening with great results.  This usually includes heavy applications of organic mulches.  

Thanks Gray. I'll have about 2,000 square feet (more if I want it) and I'll be growing (solo) enough food for two(ish) people; mostly staples. So: corn, potatoes, cabbage, cauli/broc, kale, lettuce, beets, carrots  etc. A variety of food rotated annually in the Moravian-style mounded beds. I've only ever used no-till methods, but with a plot this large (which is currently under grass), there's no way I won't have to use equipment to get started. I'm worried that without the aid of implements, I won't be able to maintain the garden on my own, especially as it grows into a little farmlette (eventually I'll sell to my local farmers market along with my pottery).

Hope this helps.

That's an ongoing debate around here. Personally, I find that some use of power equipment is a practical necessity with a very large garden plot. At least at the start, when preparing new soil. There is a limit to how much you can do by hand.

Is your tiller a rototiller or a tine cultivator?

Rototillers are great for chewing up the top few inches of sod when starting a new garden; but going deep churns up the soil layers and sometimes creates a hard pan underneath.

Tine cultivators loosen and aerate soil without destroying the soil layers. That is generally considered much less destructive. A broadfork is essentially a hand-powered tine cultivator.

Meanwhile, I'm fitting the bucket of my little 26 HP tractor with 5" tines from farm harrows. I think it it will be great for my sandy soil (dragged backwards, on the float setting).

In a similar situation of prepping an overgrown pasture we employed a minimal till strategy just to break up that thick sod layer.  (David the Good has an informative YouTube video on this)
We used a little tractor w/ potato plow to flip over the sod to kill it. Then we went at with hoes to break up the clumps (crop-fit!). Finally when everything was broken up we used a Hoss manual wheel hoe to further breakdown the now dead grass and mix in  a small amount of manure and compost to make the beds fluffy and fertile for planting.
I was happy to see tons of squiggly worms during the process and we ended up with a respectable harvest the very first growing season.
The entire process took @ 1 month or so from breaking ground to planting.
When flipping beds the next time we just do a very light hoe to reincorporate new compost/manure and whatever garden refuse is left from the prior crop.
Happy Planting!

Hi Sara Beth,

I am going to have to agree with John on many points here.  I think that a subcompact tractor is a wonderful, vastly underrated piece of equipment.  For 13 years I had a JD 2305, the newer model to John’s JD 2210.  It was just amazing.

However, today I would be reluctant to use one for engaging the ground as I have embraced a good deal of no-till practices.  That’s not to say I didn’t use it for digging garden beds in my pre-Permies days, only that I would be reluctant to use one now.

I would say the most important attachment is the loader and bucket as you can move all sorts of goodies to your new garden.

Now one approach that might be worth considering is to till the soil ONCE, just to get a seedbed, but then practice no-till.  Again, we’re it me, I would avoid a tiller—it rips the ground too much and is expensive!  Instead, maybe consider going with something with tines.

But these are all my thoughts.  You feel perfectly free to use your own judgment.  It is, after all, your land.

Good luck!

Eric

Sarah Beth Hopton wrote: I'll have about 2,000 square feet (more if I want it) and I'll be growing (solo) enough food for two(ish) people; mostly staples. So: corn, potatoes, cabbage, cauli/broc, kale, lettuce, beets, carrots  etc. A variety of food rotated annually in the Moravian-style mounded beds.

I am not familiar with this style.

Sarah Beth said, " I've only ever used no-till methods, but with a plot this large (which is currently under grass), there's no way I won't have to use equipment to get started. I'm worried that without the aid of implements, I won't be able to maintain the garden on my own, especially as it grows into a little farmlette (eventually I'll sell to my local farmers market along with my pottery).

Hope this helps.

Here are some threads that might be of interest to you or others:

https://permies.com/t/36419/convert-pasture-garden-tilling

https://permies.com/t/116574/Preparing-bit-pasture-garden-space

Eric Hanson wrote:Hi Sara Beth,

I am going to have to agree with John on many points here.  I think that a subcompact tractor is a wonderful, vastly underrated piece of equipment.  For 13 years I had a JD 2305, the newer model to John’s JD 2210.  It was just amazing.

However, today I would be reluctant to use one for engaging the ground as I have embraced a good deal of no-till practices.  That’s not to say I didn’t use it for digging garden beds in my pre-Permies days, only that I would be reluctant to use one now.

I would say the most important attachment is the loader and bucket as you can move all sorts of goodies to your new garden.

Now one approach that might be worth considering is to till the soil ONCE, just to get a seedbed, but then practice no-till.  Again, we’re it me, I would avoid a tiller—it rips the ground too much and is expensive!  Instead, maybe consider going with something with tines.

But these are all my thoughts.  You feel perfectly free to use your own judgment.  It is, after all, your land.

Good luck!

Eric

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the reply. So, you wouldn't by worried about using the tines repeatedly? Or are you saying that after the once-over for new beds, you'd mulch the paths and just hand dig/plant/harvest everything from there out?

SBH

I would use the tines once, just to break the surface enough to get a good cover crop in.

I totally understand if you don’t want to go buy a piece of tillage equipment for a single use.  Maybe a better compromise would be to get a box blade (an attachment with many uses), and use it once with the rippers fully dropped down.  Lower the BB just enough to engage the ripper tines, but not the actual blade itself.

From there, I would plant one or several deep rooting annual cover crops to help break up compacted soil and create lots of biomass on the surface.

Of course, if you wanted to start small and maybe plant a few potted plants here and there, that would be a way to get roots into the soil and get veggies the first year.  I find that tomatoes do a fine job of sending out masses of roots—exactly what you would want to break up clumps of soil.

This is just a start and we can certainly go further from here.

Eric

For a rough estimate, the compaction from any wheeled vehicle is pretty close to the tire pressure. So my tractor is about 15 and my pickup is 60 psi. For reference, a footstep is about 8.

So I don’t drive or walk on my beds after they are established. I am going to buy wheel spacers for my tractor so they will straddle the beds easier so I can use it to haul amendments and use a subsoiler. Some day…

R Scott wrote:For a rough estimate, the compaction from any wheeled vehicle is pretty close to the tire pressure. So my tractor is about 15 and my pickup is 60 psi. For reference, a footstep is about 8.

So I don’t drive or walk on my beds after they are established. I am going to buy wheel spacers for my tractor so they will straddle the beds easier so I can use it to haul amendments and use a subsoiler. Some day…

Okay, so are you concerned about the tire tracks (walking paths) compacting between the beds at all? And, over time, does that affect the subsoil beneath the beds too? Like, I'm imagining pancakes on a griddle. If we leave the middle pancake fluffy but press the pancakes on either side with our spatula over and over, eventually they'll bleed into and under the fluffy pancake. I'm just wondering if the soil works similarly. Sorry if that's a poor analogy. :)

Yes.  It is proven to reduce yield, at least to root zone. That is why I plan to use a subsoiler occasionally. Maybe as part of my bed rebuilding process.

SBH,

I own a subsoiler, and I did use it when establishing one of my garden beds.  Further, I did so with my subcompact tractor.  I needed weight on the actual subsoiler itself—I used 2 40# luggage weights and couldn’t easily have used more.  It did sink deep into the earth and really loosened the soil deeply.

But I am not so certain that this was good for the soil and I can’t see myself doing it again.  I am just too concerned about disturbing soil biology to try it again.

For my 2 cents, I suggest using your tractor to establish an initial seed bed, but let the roots, worms, bacteria, fungi, etc. do the rest of the work at “tilling” the soil.  If you really need to loosen soil, I suggest using a broadfork, though this will take more time initially than using the tractor.

Eric

correction to above:  I COULD have used more weight!  80 pounds was barely enough!

The more I think about this thread, the more I see it as this:  I suppose that a tractor (and a subcompact tractor would be a fine tractor here) might be useful for initially establishing a garden bed if one needed to really break up hard soil quickly.  A subsoiler would do this nicely, and not tend to thrash it the way a tiller would--I tend to frown on tillers today, but use your own judgement.  I would want to leave as much of the soil biota undisturbed as possible, and a subsoiler might just be the tool for this job.

But I don't know if I would want to use a tractor to *maintain* a garden bed.  I tend to think that once a garden bed is made, it should be left minimally disturbed.  Now a tractor would be a great way to bring in all sorts of goodies to spread on the surface, like mulch and compost by using the bucket (the single most useful aspect of the tractor!).  And a tractor will run all sorts of useful attachments from the rear PTO and 3 point hitch.  Subcompact tractors are incredibly useful tools!  I could see mowing down a bunch of grassy material, then using a rake to gather the materials together and piling them into compost piles to eventually be used in the garden.  I could also see using one to power a small wood chipper, though chippers are a dicey proposition on a good day.  Personally, I use them the most for the loader.  At present I only have  2 implements--a grader blade and a 6' rough cutter--and for the moment that is fine though I would like to add to that.

But back to the garden bed, I would think the best use for the tractor in *maintaining* the bed would be as a sort of power wheel barrow, bringing in heavy materials to spread on the top of the beds and carrying off heavy amounts of produce.

my 2 cents.

Eric

Sarah Beth Hopton wrote:Hi all -- I'm hoping to get some advice here. We have a TYM subcompact tractor with several farm attachments (tiller, plow, potato digger etc...). I've only ever farmed about a 400 square foot plot on raised beds and used a no-till method, in part because I farmed in the mountains of Western NC on sloped ground and so implements were not an option. Now I have about 3,000 sq feet of garden space alone (5.5 acres total minus house site) on very flat former cow pasture. The soil is amazing. Having said that, I want to protect the soil and I am trying to figure out how damaging (and therefore if I should use) the use of my sub compact tractor will be. I've read several studies on large heavy farm equipment and soil compaction, but very little on sub-compact tractors and compaction. We all know why soil compaction is bad, so I won't bother detailing here, but I'd love advice on how to use the efficiency gains of my little tractor while still abiding permaculture principles. Any help is truly appreciated.

The distributed weight of the TYM SCUT will be minimal over cattle that once roamed the property.  Should you use a PTO driven tiller, don't go so deep.  I have a disc harrow, to open the soil about 4-inches deep.  All winter long, clearing out the barns daily is scattered across the 240x70ft garden.  Come Spring before the rains and the ground is not frozen, the disc harrow is taken over the compost.  It's just enough to level and mix it into the soil.  This is a lite till method to mix it into just the very top of the soil.  Opening up the soil before the Spring rains allows those rains to add nutrients into everything and allows the compost to release more potent nutrients into the overall soil.  

The goal to retain the soil is not to till so deep, prevent rain soil run-off, prevent wind soil chaffing away.

Thank you!