Question: As an innocent farmer, or even as an Agriculturist, do you need a technician to learn about a machine such as the above, a rotavator? (CY80[1], Ching Yee Manufacturing, Taiwan). It’s a cultivator with blades that rotate, hence the coined name “rotavator.” The whole thing is dragged, not pushed.
Answer: My answers: Yes – and No. As a teacher in agriculture (graduate of UP Los Baños with a BSA major in Ag Education, 1965; with a Civil Service eligibility at the Professional Level, with high school and college teaching experiences). But as good teachers, we have to learn on our own first before we teach!
Even now, look at those blades. There are 5 pairs of blades. They cut against each other, don’t they? And since the whole thing rotates as those L-shaped and J-shaped blades cut – look at the middle of the contraption – the brown and greens are simultaneously cut and mixed together in the same rotary motion; and this is repeated as you cultivate the field.
Technically, it is called the rotary tiller or rotary cultivator[2]. Australian Arthur Clifford Howard invented this one, patenting the design in 1920, hence it is also called the Howard Rotavator.
The Teaching_Learning Lesson From The Rotavator
If you don’t know anything and want to know more about a machine, go watch someone use it. Observe what happens, and then ask questions. If the fellow does not have the answer/s, so much more to learn!
In the case of the rotavator, I have been reading and writing about it since 08 November 2015 (see my essay “Women, Urban Agriculture & InangLupa[3],” A Magazine Called Love), so I know much about it.
But the lesson here is not to know more from me about the rotavator but to know more about something you don’t know, so that you can begin to understand and then in a little while teach! That is to say, even if the subject – or object – is foreign to you, you can approach to learn about it intelligently:
Understanding what it does is
the beginning of understanding
how it works!
Now I remember – that’s exactly what happened to me when I began to get interested in learning how to do word processing using WordStar Version 1 – starting 28 December 1985, or 35 years ago! First I had to study the commands – I already knew how to type – the first one of course being how to operate the desktop computer and then open WordStar to get to work on something I was writing.
To appreciate how the rotavator works, compare what happens with the disc plow – it throws up chunks of soil from below, inverts them, and leaves them to dry up. There is no mixing of soil and anything green growing – no layer of mulch formed over the surface of the field. Now then:
I’m telling you: It is that surface mulch that is your secret organic fertilizer!@517
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