Smooth Tillage with Smart Controls

Apr 17, 2025
By Ryan Ridley
Assistant Editor, North American Content, Farms.com

Boost Field Efficiency with Salford’s HALO VRT

The Salford HALO VRT is a high-performance tillage tool designed to meet the evolving needs of modern agriculture.

This tillage tool features a high-speed disk system with five-inch blade spacing that allows for hydraulic adjustment from 2° to 15°.

This flexibility enables the machine to perform a wide range of tillage operations, from vertical tillage to more aggressive primary tillage, offering efficiency and adaptability in varying soil conditions.

Farms.com met with Dave Gunkelman, territory manager with Salford Group, to learn more about the HALO VRT.

Engineered for versatility, the HALO VRT is equipped with heavy-duty double baskets and an optional rubber packer wheel.

These features are supported by a hydraulic down-pressure system that maintains constant pressure, ensuring the machine stays level and balanced across the field, even during high-speed operation.

Gunkelman explained that unlike more rigid disc systems, the HALO VRT includes a built-in accumulator system within the tilt cylinders. This system stabilizes pressure and helps prevent rocking, promoting a smoother, more consistent tillage experience.

This tool is fitted with 22-inch blades on five-inch spacing and is available in multiple working widths, including 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, and 40 feet. This range of sizes provides farmers with options suitable for various farm sizes and operational requirements.

For ease of use, the HALO VRT can be operated with or without a joystick control system. When a joystick is not available, the equipment can run using three tractor remotes. With a hydraulic jack added, the machine may require up to six remotes.

With its hydraulic control, adaptable design, and rugged components, it stands out as a reliable tool for both vertical and primary tillage.

The Salford Halo VRT provides an ideal solution for producers seeking improved field performance and greater control over tillage operations.

Take a closer look in the video below.

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”