Controlled traffic farming
A farming system for minimising soil compaction, improving soil health and increasing yield
Don’t drive your car over your garden flowerbeds!
This is logical. If you did, you would compact the soil, reducing water holding capacity and infiltration, reducing soil biota and probably making your flowerbed look pretty ordinary.
This is exactly what we are doing in conventional broad acre farming today. Often more than 80% of field area is compacted from unrestricted traffic of heavy farm machinery. Soil compaction happens immediately, from just one pass, and the damage is long term. To combat soil compaction, farmers need to burn lots of fuel, deep ripping the soil, disturbing soil structure and biota, leading to soil degradation. The solution is controlled traffic farming – a farming system that controls all the traffic on ‘tram lines’ so that the area of compaction is limited.
Tramlines keep heavy machinery
from compacting soil.The first thing to do is develop and system for controlling traffic on your fields. Up and back systems are much more effective than round and round, and you can standardise your equipments wheel track widths so that the various wheels run down the same tramlines. Modifying equipment can be difficult and costly, but it is amazing how creative and ingenious farmers, particularly Australian farmers, can be.
There are two main options when it comes to controlled traffic farming: low-tech and high-tech. High tech is a much more effective way to go, but the costs are often quite daunting to most farmers. High tech controlled traffic farming means satellite tracking or steering to ensure the tram lines are completely straight and traffic on them does not overlap the bed areas. Products such as Beeline Auto Steering is rather expensive, but costs are coming down every year. Other than the obvious benefits of this system, you can also incorporate it with satellite imagery to identify areas of a field with low soil moisture, or with pest infestations, and then deal with only the areas that need attention via the satellite guidance system.
Benefits of CTFThe low tech method of controlled traffic farming is much cheaper to start, but has its difficulties. You still need to modify your equipment to standard wheel widths, and you then need to mark out the tram lines and visually navigate your machinery to ensure you stay on the right line. You can use markers on booms or spray arms to guide your position, but no matter how hard you try, you will also get to the end of the run and look back and see that the line is not straight. It is also very difficult to continue to concentrate for long periods of time. Although it may seem like a large expense, it is really better to take the high-tech option from the beginning. Get some expert advise and take the plunge into effective controlled traffic farming.
Controlled traffic farming decreases fuel costs, increases productivity and yield, protects and enhances the soil and most importantly is more profitable for the farmer.
This site is a resource on controlled traffic farming and is designed to be easy to read and understand. You should get all the information you need to decide whether controlled traffic farming is for you from this site. Please, read and explore this site, find out how to convert to, or improve your controlled traffic farming system.