In recent years, the aims of stubble cultivation have changed in many places. In the past, stubble cultivation was mainly employed to control weeds and loosen the soil, but most fields are nowadays largely free from weeds, with very few weeds still producing seeds in crops. Modern combine harvesters with extremely wide cutting units need to process very large volumes of straw, which harvesters are often unable to chop optimally and distribute across the full working width. It is particularly important to incorporate volunteer cereals and these large volumes of organic matter intensively when seeding a subsequent crop into mulch. At the same time, capillary action needs to be disrupted during the first stubble cultivation pass to prevent moisture from being lost. Once volunteer cereals have emerged, seeding into mulch takes place at greater depths in order to reduce the density of straw in the topsoil and thus to improve the emergence conditions for the subsequent crop.
LEMKEN offers a wide range of compact disc harrows and cultivators that allows forward-thinking farmers and contract farmers to adapt their approach to stubble and primary soil cultivation ideally to their individual locations, soils and given crop rotations:
