Hi Graham, Taylor,
Me too! Very excited to come across this community initiative. I am also a permaculture designer and do pro-bono consultancy to assist small scale farmer mates and want to start building one of these rovers in Australia. I really work in IT, but also farm. I’m also setting up no till for portions of my new Permaculture farm.
I’ve created a Requirements Backlog thread to help capture User Stories>
Please append your User Story there for your No-Till Cover Crop rolling implement.
To share experience;- I was looking to buy the 3pl roller implement for my small tractor too. Alternatively, I’ve been pulling a 200KG log with heavy bolts and chains either end and that works 80% pretty well. Lighter logs didn’t work well. I was thinking of notching the log with a chainsaw, so it crimps. But then I bought a Flail Mower/mulcher which finely mulches everything and evenly spreads it. A 100 times better for soil improvement in my opinion, I can’t recommend it enough, albeit it’s twice the cost of a brush hog/slasher implement. The flail mower really is the best way to get a lot of organic matter finely chopped and spread into the soil over a large area, in one go, inbetween rows/swales or intercropping.
After utterly devasating bushfire storms here a couple of years back, a combination of ripping on contour with regular chop ‘n’ drop, cover crops, and slowly fixing the hydrology has done wonders to regenerating my soil life. The flail mower was a game changer. Would love to get it automated for the permaculture community given how much chop ‘n’ drop for fertility and beneficial weed control we do in the warm temperate to sub tropics. Weeds truly are our friends.
Great to see another permie onboard!
Cheers,
Raj