 vegetable farmers, and their weed control machines. In this video, we visit nine vegetable farms in three New England states to talk with growers about their weed control equipment and how it's used. They will describe a variety of cultivation tools and approaches to weed control. Hopefully, their knowledge and experience will help you get a better understanding of cultivation equipment and techniques. Matching cultivation tools to the soils, crops, weeds, and other particulars of a farm can be a complex task. Growers that are trying to reduce or eliminate their reliance on herbicides need information that will help them make good decisions about cultivation and weed control. Extension, research, and the private sector working together can generate that kind of information. Funded in part by the USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program promoting environmentally sound and economically viable agriculture. This video was produced by Vern Grubinger, University of Vermont Extension System, and Mary Jane Els, University of Massachusetts Agroecology Program. Well, my name is Bob Gray, and my wife, Kim, and I farm here in South Newbury, Vermont. We run a roadside sales operation. We have approximately 30 acres under cultivation. We try to grow a wide variety of vegetables, and we have a pick-your-own strawberry operation and a wholesale strawberry operation. I would say that strawberries are about a third of our crop, well, a third of our income anyway, and mixed vegetables sold in our retail stand are the two-thirds. We're here today to show you some of our cultivation techniques. We feel very strongly that any weed is a bad weed. I don't like to see any weeds in the field. That doesn't always happen. We use herbicides. Probably our biggest crop for herbicides is corn. We think corn is a good crop to clean a field with. If we get a field that really has a lot of weed seeds in it, we can put corn and go with herbicide, and it doesn't get rid of all the weed seeds, but it certainly lowers the pressure. The green we're using now is something we modified from a... Well, we got it from Canada. It's a Canadian field cultivator, they call it. And we used it basically just for weed control. And we had to modify it from a larger size. Actually, these were wings that came from a 14-foot model or something, and someone had sold the 8-foot center portions, and this was the outside wings, we welded it together and made it so it would fit between the rows of plastic. When we lay down our plastic, we always try to put the plastic just to attract the width or a little more apart. And we use a lot of space between our plastic, mainly just for weed control, because we found that when you had to do it by hand, with a whole or a hand-pushed cultivator, it just never got done. But if we can jump on the tractor, we can easily do three or four or five acres in an afternoon or do 10 lengths of plastic in a half an hour. And the advantage of this field cultivator over a tiller, we used to take the tiller and crank it up so it was really shallow and just cuffed the top two inches to soil. It worked very well, but it was slow. The beauty of this piece of equipment here is that you can adjust the depth. And so we can use it as a primary tillage tool to loosen the soil and go six to eight inches deep. If that's what we want to do, but when we're controlling weeds, we just want to skim the surface of the soil top two inches. And so with this adjusting wheel here, we can raise these tines up or down and just barely skim because we don't want to bring out more soil. We want to just sterilize the soil, the top two inches of soil and kill those weeds that are in that zone. So this is just simply a spring loaded, I mean, a spring shank cultivator tooth that vibrates and creates a little more tillage action. But the thing I like the best is this reel in the back in that once you've broken the soil up, there's some claws of dirt like this that a weed is actually growing in. The time it gets through this thing rolling over, it breaks it apart and expose the root and it literally hangs the weed up to draw. As you can see some of them hanging on the basket there. And that's the important thing. You get the soil off the bare root of the small weed, flip it over and it'll lay it on top of the ground where the sun can bake it and kill it. We've been trying to figure out a system for the edges of plastic for as many years as we use plastic. And this is coming closer to what we want all the time. We used to use shovels, sweeps they call them off a cultivator, but that would either go above the plastic and just skim along and not kill the weeds or go below the plastic and loosen it up and not kill the weeds either. We find this, we can run right over the top of the plastic and in fact sometimes I think it even stretches the plastic tighter and makes it the plastic better because it'll roll over the top and push little holes in and punch it down further than the soil. So this is the zone, if you understand, on the edge of the plastic where the plastic curls down under where you secure it to the soil that is always a weed problem. You can't take off, even with a hole you end up tearing the plastic. This thing seems to go over and flick the weeds off if they're small. As I said, again, these weeds are too big. We had a problem here, we missed them the first time through. Under ideal conditions, if you time it right, it works quite well. This piece of equipment here actually came off a Lilliston collivator. Some of your larger Lilliston setups have what they call an inner wheel, it's a smaller spider wheel that runs very close to the plant and we just took it and modified it with the same hookup to this collivator setup here. We got an adjustment here so we can swivel it to get an angle. The more angle you get, the more action you get and we think it works pretty well. I got some weeds here in front of me and the time to get weeds is actually before you see them are just when they're an inch or less tall because the root system isn't very strong and by just flicking the dirt, you can roll the soil over and get the weed exposed to the surface where it'll die in a half an hour or less in the sun. Take a larger weed here, which is one we missed from the last collivation. This weed has so much reserve, moisture and nutrients in the stalk itself that it'll sacrifice that and that weed there will not die in an hour in the sun, it may not die all day in the sun. So you've missed it. Once they get this big, you're in real trouble. It means hand work. So timing is everything and we always have problems. If it rains four days in a row and it's warm and you can't collivate anyway, then the weeds get away from you. I guess that leads me to another point is that we have lots of collivators and lots of tractors and I think you almost never have too many because I like to have each collivation and piece of equipment on each tractor because sometimes you don't have the time to do that. It'll be nice just to be able to jump from one tractor onto another one. It's kind of extravagant, but you can usually find a used tractor that if you don't use it too heavily it'll last for years and just mount a certain piece of equipment on that tractor and get it set up perfectly and leave it. This piece of equipment here is a Lilison rolling tine collivator and that's a very versatile tillage tool because it adjusts so many ways it'll do so many things. You can adjust it this way like if you want to hill potatoes you can crank it up pretty steep and throw dirt up. You can adjust it back and forth if you see it this way for more action if you want it to dig more and move more dirt then you turn this backwards you can slide it this way to get it closer to the plant or further away from the plant. We like it a lot use it on many, many crops right here on broccoli we use it to actually throw dirt to the very weeds. We have the front sweeps on and then we come along which will move the dirt in under the plant and this will actually throw dirt behind and throw it over the plant and if you watch your timing if the weeds aren't too big you can keep this crop absolutely clean I think I can get 99% of the weeds in this crop every time as long as I'm there when I'm supposed to be there. I want to talk about these collivator sweeps and what they do but it's important you should never let your collivator sweeps rust and I always do because I seem too busy to clean them up and they'll rust literally overnight because of the acidity of the soil or something once they rust the dirt doesn't slide smoothly over the collivator it boils over so it doesn't do nearly as nice a job of collivating once you get dirt sticking to it it begins to boil and roll and doesn't do nearly as nice a job and that's just because it rusted and gets sticky and by rights they should be cleaned off every time you get through an oil and even if you have rust on them they should be sanded until they're really smooth we don't collivate enough enough acreage at one time so that they get smoothed up if you're collivating 10 acres by that time they'll finally get all shiny and smooth but here they rust last from they'll set these collivator shanks the sweeps they're called so that they'll throw dirt underneath the plant and bury up any weeds lots of times my dad used to say there are two ways to kill a weed you can cut it off, you can bury it up and I think sometimes burying up a weed is just as successful as actually digging it up because when you dig it up it still has a root if you cover it up you smother it and it's just not going to grow so all you want to do is throw dirt over the weeds with your collivator sweeps like this and bury them up and if you get them on there an inch or so tall it works very very well so you're going to move these in or out so they do just what you want them to do speed is important, the little son likes to go fast that's the collivator in the rear and if you can go fast and not hit the plants with these it will work even better because it will throw the dirt more this collivation equipment here is called a budding in-row weeder and the in-row comes and literally will weed around the plant if you can see my fingers here the rubber fingers go like this around the plant and scrub the weeds out and there's a little metal prongs on the bottom of the finger wheel and it spins the fingers and on transplanted plants like strawberry or broccoli or even actually fast growing plants like beans it does a beautiful job onions in a single row anything that can take a little bit of scrubbing today this is just about the right time in timing to collivate the weeds are just coming through and this thing here will just take them and actually flick them right out of the ground if you let them get too big it won't work it has to be done when the weeds are an inch or less in height once you get past that stage then you're screwed up we love it, it's an incredible job it's like getting 15 people hoeing all at once you're doing all the work yourself it's mounted on an Alice Chalmers G tractor, they don't make them anymore but it's made in the 40s and early 50s, a little lightweight tractor with a motor in the rear, you can see perfectly what you're doing, it turns on and dying so the adjustment the actual adjustment on this budding weeder it does all kinds of things, it goes in and out it goes forward and back these rear things can be turned around so they'll throw dirt in toward the plant or reverse so they'll throw dirt away from the plant very very versatile piece of equipment one of the drawbacks is you can see right here it doesn't like wet soil but it shouldn't be collivating the rain anyway because the dirt will pack up underneath so you have to get off as well and bang on it to shake the dirt off so it'll do what it's supposed to do but in dry soil, sandy soil it'll work in stones as long as there aren't too many of them and then with this machine you go fairly slow maybe 2 to 3 miles per hour depending on the crop and how strong it is so we always have something in the front weeding around the plant and then something in the back covering the wheel track but it's more than that with the other tractors that have the lilistons on them, the liliston can actually do more work than just covering the wheel track so the front collivate or whatever it may be like for a shovel or fingers like this works around the plant and the liliston can come along and finish up or level out or throw more dirt or hill depending on what you want to do so we always try to figure out what we're trying to do and put a piece of equipment that'll do the most we can do the most good