A cultipacker is a piece of

agricultural Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled peopl ...

equipment that crushes dirt clods, removes air pockets, and presses down small

stones In geology, rock (or stone) is any naturally occurring solid mass or aggregate of minerals or mineraloid matter. It is categorized by the minerals included, its chemical composition, and the way in which it is formed. Rocks form the Earth's ...

, forming a smooth, firm seedbed. Where

seed A seed is an embryonic plant enclosed in a protective outer covering, along with a food reserve. The formation of the seed is a part of the process of reproduction in seed plants, the spermatophytes, including the gymnosperm and angiosper ...

has been broadcast, the roller gently firms the

soil Soil, also commonly referred to as earth or dirt, is a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids, and organisms that together support life. Some scientific definitions distinguish ''dirt'' from ''soil'' by restricting the former ...

around the seeds, ensuring shallow seed placement and good seed-to-soil contact. The term ''cultipacker'' is almost exclusively applied to ridged rollers, while the terms ''field roller'' or ''land roller'' may refer to either a smooth or a ridged roller. Some farmers treat the terms as mutually exclusive, but many others treat the ridged tools as a class of field rollers. For example, C.H. Wendel's ''Encyclopedia of American Farm Implements and Antiques'' covers the whole category as ''land rollers''. The term ''cultipacker'' appeared in English around 1914 and probably originated as a brand name of the C.G. Dunham Company of

Berea, Ohio Berea ( ) is a city in Cuyahoga County in the U.S. state of Ohio and is a western suburb of Cleveland. The population was 19,093 at the 2010 census. Berea is home to Baldwin Wallace University, as well as the training facility for the Clevela ...

, which advertised "Culti-Packer" models starting around that time. That company did not have the ridged-roller subcategory to itself by any stretch, as Wendel's book demonstrates, but for whatever reason, its name for its version stuck well in many minds. By the 1920s and ever since, it has been widely used in a genericized sense, at least in some regions of the U.S. if not nationwide. In Britain, an equivalent tool is usually called a Cambridge roller or Cambridge roll; D.J. Smith's ''Discovering Horse-drawn Farm Machinery'' says, "The Cambridge roll, named after its makers, was a ring roller made up of numerous equally spaced rings or ridges." Despite the suggestion of soil compaction in the "packer" part of the name, cultipackers and other land rollers exert high pressure only on the high spots (such as clods); the baseline pressure at the rest of the footprint is not especially high, which is to say, not higher than a person's footprint pressure. A person intentionally stomping hard on a particular spot can pack the dirt tighter than a cultipacker packs it. This is appropriate because seedbeds need only be firm, not excessively compacted. Procedure is used before and after seeding by using ridged rollers to crush dirt clods, remove air pockets, and press down small stones, forming a smooth, firm seedbed

References

Agricultural machinery {{Agri-stub