Zone Builders

Unverferth Zone Builders are a common sight on farms using a form of strip or zone tillage. The smallest model I’ve seen is the two row model used for research purposes, that aside I’ve seen four to twelve row units in use throughout New York State. The size of these implements is due in part to size of the farm fields, which in turn is influenced by the surrounding landscape. In the hilly region of eastern New York, fields and equipment tend to be smaller. In western New York there are fewer hills; fields and equipment are typically larger. A four row zone builder is pictured below.


Most of the zone builders I’ve seen in use have a coulter to cut through surface residue, a shank, two fluted coulters, and a rolling basket in each gang. In this case a gang means all the things that till one area; the zone builder above has four gangs. The necessity of the rolling baskets is debatable. In heavier soils I’ve heard reports of them clogging or not really breaking up the clods. On lighter soils they seem to do decent job preparing the seedbed. I’ve seen cultipacker wheels substituted for rolling baskets and according to the grower who came up with the idea the set up worked great on the heavier soils in his fields. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of this, but what grower did is take the rolling baskets off and used the frame to mount the cultipacker wheels.