2012 Volume 74 Issue 1 Pages 56-65
The problems of rotary cultivators that are widely used in Japan for inter-row cultivating and earthing up are soil kneading under wet soil conditions and low travel speed. To improve these problems, we have developed disk cultivator-ridgers. With these machines, inter-row soil is turned over laterally by the revolution of the disks and consequently inter-row cultivating and earthing up are performed. The effect of chisels and travel speeds was investigated and the following results were obtained. (1) In fields where disks cold not cultivate sufficiently, earthing up performance was maintained by the use of chisels. (2) The soil pulverizing performance did not become worse at higher travel speeds. (3) The most stable earthing up performance was obtained at travel speeds of 1.0-1.6m/s.
