Green and bountiful lands are direct results of optimal land preparation. You can be a professional farmer with experience or a beginner, and it is always good to learn methods to prepare your land for the crops you will plant. You can use a simple instrument such as a plough or even a Mahindra tractor cultivator. This blog contains some tips and tricks that will help you prepare your land right. Let us dig in!
Tips to Prepare your Land
The Right Time to Start
Ideally, you would want to start preparing your land a year before farming in that land. If the land has been left untended for some time, there would be weeds and sod. You should work on clearing these away a year before to reduce any pest issues that might arise on your land when farming.
You can use a shovel to clear away these weeds and weeding the whole farm with a weeder a year before planting your crops.
Testing Your Soil
Before you start the process of preparing your land, you should check your soil’s pH levels. Then, you can simply collect your land’s soil and send it to a lab. Such tests would determine if the ground is ready to farm in or if something has to be adjusted to make it cultivatable.
Some universities do this testing process, so a safe approach would be the nearest university if you have difficulties finding a lab.
Collecting Soil
You can collect soil samples with a coring tool. Punch holes and collect soil from different spots of land with the tool. Doing it all over your land would help you get information about your whole land. You could also use a shovel if you do not have a coring tool. Now you can pack it in a package, label your name, add your phone number, and send it to the lab.
Adjusting the pH
Ideally, adding lime or wood ash filled-in fertilizer to your moist soil before 2 to 3 months would help raise the pH of your soil.
If you want to lower your pH levels, you could spread aluminium sulfate using fertilizer all over your land.
Tilling Your Soil
Scoop up to 30 centimetres of land and flip it over to lift the soil and loosens it up, helping the crops form deep roots and assisting them in their growth. You can do this with a simple spade. Farmers with bigger lands use tools such as a tractor cultivator to finish the job. You can make use of one among three methods to till your soil:
Conventional tilling
Conventional tilling involves tilling your land in the autumn season and using a Mahindra Cultivator a power tiller before you start planting your crops in the summer. People used this method to eliminate weed and diseased plant residue in the past.
The same factor became the reason for this method getting unpopular – When the land is disturbed constantly, the soil can erode easily. You can counteract this by planting legume crops such as soybeans, peas, peanuts, rajma, and different types of dal. These carry less plant residue, so you don’t have to till deeper.
Conservation tilling
This method is simpler, although it increases the potential for manual labour. Using hoes and rakes to till your land minimally is how you can do this. As said before, tilling a lot might result in soil erosion and the destruction of humus in the soil. Traditional methods involve using a tiller, which might erode the soil if one doesn’t prepare the land correctly.
Therefore one can use this method to keep soil disturbance to a minimum and start planting the crops after this.
If you prepare the land properly a year before planting, the pest and weed problem can be solved easily. However, if you haven’t prepared the land this way, you can make use of the conventional method or use this method in addition to using fertilizers.
Creating canals in your land
Start raking the soil and making raised beds above land level. Give spacing between these beds, and make them 3 feet apart from each bed. These beds are where your crops are going to grow, and these canals are to make the water flow through, ensuring nourishment for the plants.
Conclusion
Provided that you have followed the given tips, you can rest easy on the aspect of preparing your land. If you are living in a region with the risk of animals grazing your farms, you can employ fences in your farm to make sure your farm is safe from all kinds of problems. Hope you have a great yield!
