What is Tillage?
Tillage is the process of managing the soil before planting and making it lose and safe from weeds before and during the growth of yields. The only objective and primary motive to till the soil or soil management can be separated into three different steps - first is to prepare a proper seedbed, second is to kill the weeds and the third phase to improve the structure of the soil.
History of Tillage
The main objective of basic tilling is to break the soil to make an appropriate seedbed. Managing soil by breaking and loosening is the ancient technique of tilling since the beginning of farming. Earlier it was done with various types of handmade wooden ploughs. The prehistoric man used simple tillage tools made with wood and other material to break the soil. Perhaps it was a tree’s broken branch they first used as a tillage tool.
Use of Plough
The initial step of preparing seedbed before planting is done by the plough. This makes a plough the most basic and most important farm equipment for a farmer to have. A plough is used to break up the soil into small particles, burying the trash under the surface completely.
Types of Plough
Various types of the plough are used to till the soil such as –
· Disc plough
· Mould-board plough
· Reversible mould-board plough etc.
· Rotary Plough or Rotavator
· Chisel Plough
· Sub-soil Plough or Subsoiler
These are the most common types of a plough used widely to break the top layer of the soil and many other ploughing tasks prepare and manage the soil. Mould board plough or Disc plough are improved versions of a plough that is specially designed to break up the soil and to invert furrow slice while killing weeds at the same time to improve the soil as per the soil conditions
Advantages of using the Plough
In modern farming practices, it would not be possible to imagine ploughing a big farming land without a plough. In rural areas, farmers must be using the traditional ways of ploughing in the small pieces of land, like pulling the plough behind the oxen yet the equipment they use are modern. While it will be hard for a big scale farmer or producer to plough the big pieces of land without modern ploughs such as Disc plough or mould-board plough. These modern ploughs are pulled behind the tractors. A modern plough like mounted disc plough or rotavator allows a farmer to plough even many acres of land in a single da. This helps them in saving the time for planting the next crop. A plough can make or turn even the barren lands into greenery by making the soil full of nutrients and ideal for growing crops.
Use of plough helps a farmer not only saving time but also in increasing productivity to get more profit by growing the quality of the crop.