By treating his 24-year-old 5m Vaderstad Carrier to a series of upgrades, Andrew Metson has created a multi-use cultivator that can double up as a cover crop drill.

In its original guise, the cultivator had two rows of straw rakes at the front, followed by twin rows of discs and a packer roller at the rear.

But to make it more aggressive, he swapped the front tines for levelling boards, using second-hand parts purchased from Brocks.

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These worked well in the dry, but in sticky conditions they would get gummed up with trash, so he replaced the wearing metal with alternate narrow and straight tines that allow material to pass through more easily.

To save swapping the metal around next time, he has purchased a new front toolbar that can simply be bolted in place.

As his main drill is a Weaving Sabre Tine with front tank, he also came up with a simple way of converting the Carrier to sow cover crops.

This involved fitting a distribution head above the cultivator – fed from the front tank – with pipes running to each of the rear discs.

Tine cultivator

A bigger project was to build an entirely new tine cultivator to sit in place of the discs, which is used after harvest at speeds of 12-15kph to get weed seeds to chit.

This was made using long pigtail tines imported from France, which are mounted over five rows and are hydraulically adjustable. 

Other upgrades include replacing the original electric front depth stop with a tougher hydraulic one, streamlining the pipework so fewer spools are required, fitting a toolbox bracket and making twin storage boxes for the wings.