It’s almost as if they’re breeding. Walking around the tillage events over the past couple of seasons, observers could not fail to notice the proliferation of shallow disc/tine cultivators. Amazone added its contribution, the Pegasus, in late 2001. Before that, however, we had an early opportunity to try one of the pre-production machines, the 4m SG 4003-2
Looking over the likes of the Simba Solo, Quivogne Tinemaster and the Gregoire Besson Discordon, the most natural assumption is that it must cost a bucket-load to get into minimum tillage. Not necessarily so.
The double-bank cultivator, complete with winged tines and levelling discs, represents a considerably less costly alternative and over recent seasons has been developed so that it does a much better job in both shallow stubble incorporation as well as any primary cultivation. Underbeam clearances and overall machine tine spacings have been tweaked to good trashworking effect. Enter our test Pegasus machine. Working through the pre-production 4m wide unit, first point to note is its high coupling points.
This means that on most tractors the operator has to wind the lift rods into their shortest possible position to achieve sufficient ground clearance when the Pegasus is raised. Flipside here is that, in work, the link arms point in the right direction in relation to the tractor axle to achieve the best angle of soil penetrating attack.
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