Pitting
Under stoning is the removal of reading stones from the soil that would otherwise interfere with tillage and mechanical harvesting. The pitting is one of the measures of melioration .
In the past (sometimes still in the present) the pitting was done by hand, the picked stones were placed on the edge of the field and form ecologically important piles of stones that are protected by nature . Some of the stones were used for road construction and the construction of buildings.
In the GDR , at the Institute for Arable and Crop Production (now: ZALF ) in Müncheberg, heavy technology for mechanical pitting was developed and also used in practice.
One method was surface pitting . This was carried out with a tractor-pulled fork stone collector. More laborious, because it was operated with a caterpillar tractor, was the pitting of the soil , in which the soil was sifted 45 cm deep from stones with a diameter of 5 cm. However, this method was not carried out across the board due to high energy costs.
A third mechanical process was deep pitting , in which the soil was plowed through with 85 cm long swords, which found deep-lying boulders and brought them to the surface. The process also served to loosen deeply consolidated soils.
The above-mentioned pitting methods were suitable for deep soils, especially in the north, in the area of the Quaternary Ice Age deposits.
In southern Germany, attempts were made to smash the disturbing stones ( sedimentary rocks : lime , sandstone , weathered gneiss , slate, etc.) on the arable land with rapidly rotating striking tools and to break them up so that they did not impede mechanized agriculture. These procedures, too, have seldom got beyond an experimental stage.
literature
- Author collective: Pocket book of the Melioration- Volume Flurmelioration-, Deutscher Landwirtschaftsverlag, 1979
- Harro Hess : The Devil's Stones, Westkreuz, 2002