A Guide To Mulching And Mulchers: What You Need To Know

What Is Mulching?

Mulching is a widely practiced technique that greatly benefits your soil and plants when done properly. It is the act of covering the soil organic material by mulching or integrating green manure, such as cutting grass/weeds bark, wood chips, leaves, or other organic material in order to persevere the soil’s moisture. It also improves soil quality, protects it against weather conditions and adds nutrients.

Using a mulcher or crop crimper can help to reduce the cost and dangers of chemical pollution on your paddocks. Though farmers can use fertilisers to put back nutrients into the soil after removing their crops, mulching will improve soil health long-term and lead to quality crops.

What Are Mulchers Used For?

Flail mowers are great for Pasture Topping

Flail mowers are ideal for topping your pasture. While other topping machines tend to cut the grass and lie it over intact, a mulcher will cut the grass and weeds fine enough to allow it to break down faster, putting nutrients back into the soil while boosting regrowth. Mulchers also spread out animal waste and lessen the sour patches of grass. Compared to other topping machines, mulchers are more robust and have low maintenance.

Speed discs or Multi discs – integrating Crop Residue

Mulchers are also the ideal machine to deal with crop residue because they turn the soil over allowing green manure to integrate with your soil breaking down into nutrients for your future crop. Mulching stubble greatly reduces blockages of cultivation equipment/seeding/planing by spreading up the breakdown of trash.

What To Consider When Choosing The Right Mulcher

Width

To ensure you get the right width to suit your tractor, your mulcher needs to be narrow enough to fit through your gates. Though it is beneficial to have one that covers more ground, having one that is too wide can cause scalping in rough terrains.

Horsepower Rating

You want the peace of mind that your machine has plenty of tolerance for reliability and scope to run it on a bigger tractor if you decide to upgrade.

Transmission

A dual transmission mulcher is where the rotor is driven from both ends. This decision is partly to do with getting enough belts for your horsepower rating, when you go over 2.5m a dual transmission is almost essential.

Flails

In many cases, the triple flail is the ideal option. It does a finer cut, smoother finish and is easier to drive than other flails. If you have a high chance of hitting larger stones or have a very abrasive environment, consider a hammer flail.

Choosing The Right Mulcher

As long as you get the right one for the job, mulchers are a great multi-purpose tool for any farm. If you’re on the lookout for high quality, mower sand mulchers , Farmtech has an extensive selection on offer. Feel free to have a browse our website for other farming machinery. If you’re interested in any of the products listed or have any questions, feel free to contact our friendly team on (02) 8776 3354.