The wheel cleaner reclaims the Green Museum

At The Green Museum, only organic farming is practiced. This also means that every year there is a major battle between our farmer and the beautiful but unwanted weeds.

The soil we have here at Gl. Estrup is even a paradise for weeds, which makes this fight even more difficult year after year, as the weeds have ideal conditions for spreading.

That's why this year our farmer has borrowed a brand new super weapon to his arsenal, to make the fight a little more even and fair.

It's about the biggest hit of the moment and the number one trend of the summer – namely the row cleaner.

This new 'super weapon' has now been tested for the first time – where a camera-controlled row cleaner took on the fight against weeds on the seven hectares covered by this year's trial.

 

Facts about row cleaning

The row cleaner is an old agricultural tool for row cleaning (removing weeds) in one or more rows. The first models were moved by hand, then came models that were pulled by horses and finally also models that were pulled by tractors.

Before the development of herbicides, mechanical weeding was essential for removing weeds. The use of mechanical weeding gradually decreased as chemical weeding agents were developed. Now weeding is becoming more common again due to legislation and changes in the use of chemical weeding agents.

Row cleaners help control weeds while reducing the consumption of herbicides, making your farm more environmentally friendly and economically sustainable.

Row weeding is used in fields of corn, sunflowers, sugar beets, rapeseed and soybeans. But row weeding is also becoming popular as a mechanical weed control in cereal crops that are grown with wider row spacing or in double rows with strip-till tillage.

Cleaning improves the plants' nutrient uptake and growth conditions. This has a great effect in terms of increasing above-ground biomass. Harrowing between the rows has a cleaning effect, which reduces the need to use herbicides and is fully in line with the trend towards more organic farming.