A new spring tine harrow specially designed for use on grassland has replaced the chain harrows and is solving an age-old problem for dairy farmer Will Taylor.

Mr.Taylor keeps 70 Friesian milkers and about 100 beef cattle at Bunkers Hill Farm his 95 acre (38 ha.) all grass holding at Morton near Bourne Lincolnshire. The milkers are housed in straw-bedded cubicles and slurry is spread on the grass throughout the winter.

"The muck contains a fair bit of straw and it tends to dry out and cake on the surface," says Mr. Taylor. "Chain harrows wouldn't shift it so the dried slurry was killing the grass underneath. In the spring the bare patches were smothered with chickweed."

Then I spotted an article in a farming magazine about somebody with exactly the same problem. His chain harrows weren't breaking up the slurry crust either so he had bought an OPICO grass harrow and was very pleased with it. "We're only about four miles from the OPICO factory so I phoned them and they brought one over for me to try."

The borrowed grass harrow worked so well that Mr. Taylor immediately bought a 4.5 m. manual folding model from his local machinery dealer Johnson Brothers in Bourne. "I did as much of the grass as I could get on straight away and I covered the rest as soon as the weather allowed.

The thin springy tines on the grass harrow break up the slurry cap and move it all over the field and three weeks afterwards the grass is tillering and looks very good. I even went over some new seeds we put in last autumn. I used the depth control wheels to stop the tines going in too deep and it hasn't damaged the plants at all.

Mr. Taylor has also used the grass harrow for levelling grass, kale and turnip seedbeds and lightly covering the seeds. "On two fields in particular it did an excellent job ripping out chickweed and as soon as the grass has grown a bit I'll do them again in the other direction. I normally have to spray the chickweed but this harrow appears to be so effective that I may be able to forget spraying that now."

" It seems to be an excellent tool that does what it's supposed to do and because it folds up for transport it's very easy to move from field to field compared to the chain harrows."

Chain harrows changed to OPICO grass harrow click here.