Mowing 32 acres with a 4' mower

[IslandTractor]

Learn something new every day around here. I'll drop "quarter section" into a few conversations in Boston and see how people respond. Might be a good screening tool for transplants from the midwest (got a bunch of them here).

I'm sure our land courts would envy your squared off property lines. Ours are more often demarkated by cow paths and brooks than surveyors lines which leads to all manner of confusion.

Thanks for the geography and history lesson.

 

[riptides]

I'm sure our land courts would envy your squared off property lines. Ours are more often demarkated by cow paths and brooks than surveyors lines which leads to all manner of confusion.

More like rocks and trees, here........

-Mike Z.

 

[sandman2234]

They have started modifying every road in this part of the country to remove any straight stretches. The land around it is curved with the roads, and of course every creek or ditch adds to the miss shaped property.
Gives surveyors something to argue about.
David from jax

 

[Farmwithjunk]

I've always been told a section, 640 acres, is a one mile by one mile square.

Part of the 45 acres I live on is being looked at by a developer. He's making what I'd consider ridiculous offers, and MAY just own 10 acres of this place if his money lands where his mouth is. In reviewing the deed and abstract, I've found references to "big limestone outcropping", Tall beech tree next to a yellow poplar tree", "just west of the middle of small stream", and crest of small hill at the base of large hill" as "survey points" from the original survey, dated in 1797. I think we burned that "tall beech tree" for firewood last winter

 

[Z-Michigan]

FWJ, that is what is called a "meets and bounds survey". It's the ancient way of doing things, but everything mapped out before the section system was developed in the early 19th century is set up that way (except for some parts of Louisiana that are on the French "long lot" system).

Yes a standard section is 1 mile square and 640 acres, but I'm sure there are errors here and there as another person mentioned.

 

[Soundguy]

Speaking of 1920.. I miss mine.. I kinda wish i hadn't of traded it in on my 7610s... ( course.. I'd be 10k$ more in debt if I hadn't... ).

I honestly don't know about the kodiak / mahindra connection.

All I know is when i went shopping for inexpensive 10' mowers.. only a few brands were in my price range.. I'm glad I went with howse.. it has been tough and was cheaper than the kodiak.. etc.

You hit on a good point about intended usage and the JD mowers.

For instance.. my 1517 is actually listed as a light duty mower... intended for light brush and jobs like ROW mowing.. etc. Since I am mainly mowing clean pasture.. it is bang up for that job.. especially since it only cost 2k$ to buy.. plus a few hundred to fix up.. etc.

The howse 10' is a heavy duty model.. and as I mentioned.. it has no qualms about ripping small trees up and mulching them if you have enough tractor in front of it.. The howse is visually built heavier than my JD mower.. etc.

Soundguy

I didn't mean any disrespect to the KK line other then the Howse is very similar in terms of quality as KK along the line. I do have a 5' King Kutter mower that came with the Ford 640 when we bought it. It cuts great but is not very heavy duty and the deck has numerous cracks. I know nothing about the chopper other then it is a KK but it does a good job cutting grass behind the 1920

The one cutter I would never waste my money on is the Kodiak. Isn't Kodiak the one building implements now for Mahindra? If so I hope they didn't just repaint them in Mahindra red.

The John Deere's they are not very impressed with are the CX and HX lines. Here is a recent discussion on them Viewing a thread - JD CX-15 flex wing mower

Not everyone uses their choppers the same way but it seems the newer Deere choppers are not holding up to the heavy use some people buy them for.

 

[LBrown59]

I mowed 8 acres with a 4' bush hog behind a B7100 -- once.

I done it dummer than that once.
Mowed 7.75 acres with my 1966 Bolens 850 tractor wirh a 38'' mower deck.

 

[LBrown59]

155 acres with a 5' mower, snort, now that's funny.

5 acres with a 155' mower sounds better to me.

 

[Cacinok]

Learn something new every day around here. I'll drop "quarter section" into a few conversations in Boston and see how people respond. Might be a good screening tool for transplants from the midwest (got a bunch of them here).

I'm sure our land courts would envy your squared off property lines. Ours are more often demarkated by cow paths and brooks than surveyors lines which leads to all manner of confusion.

Thanks for the geography and history lesson.

the property lines get a whole lot more convoluted when you get down below quarter sections. even w/ the section lines as Pat described them, occasionally you'll be out in the middle of nowhere, w/ the dirt road running north and south (or east and west for that matter) and all of the sudden, for no apparent reason, the road will turn 90 degrees go for a small bit (e.g., 40') and then turn back and continue in the original direction, they call them section corrections. took me forever to finally understand why an otherwise perfectly straight dirt road in the boonies took a jog.

 

[IslandTractor]

occasionally you'll be out in the middle of nowhere, w/ the dirt road running north and south (or east and west for that matter) and all of the sudden, for no apparent reason, the road will turn 90 degrees go for a small bit (e.g., 40') and then turn back and continue in the original direction, they call them section corrections. took me forever to finally understand why an otherwise perfectly straight dirt road in the boonies took a jog.

That section correction thing, odd as it is, at least has a rationale. Come visit Boston sometime and travel on Milk St which now is lined with 40 story office buildings carefully aligned on a road that meanders, literally, like a cow path. Even Bostonians cannot figure out the roads in the colonial section of town. Only the cows understand the logic.

 

[Spiveyman]

Some things are worth being hired out, you just have ot learn which.

Couldn't agree more. Takes me about 3 minutes to call a guy and have him mow my 170 acres with his huge John Deere and a batwing.

 

[patrick_g]

Clint, The description of my property involved a nail in a tree so many feet from the boundary. The tree was removed a couple years ago. Luckily it was not an actual part of the boundary but just a land mark to help find a buried metal pin (vertical rebar) driven below the surface of the edge of the section line.

I have an ongoing problem because a previous surveyor erroneously assumed that my quarter was of standard size. The legal description of my propoerty has a less and except section that describes a 1.2 acre lot cut out of my property that I do not own. Unfortunately the description doesn't match reality and the property lines are off by about 5-6 feet E-W . The lot is sized correctly but the legal description is in error as to its precise location. My "quarter" is about 10-12 feet larger E-W than the standard (2640 ft or half mile.) The bottom line is that after allowing for the quarter being larger and having 1.2 acres cut out it is essentially a wash and I have 160 acres MOL.

Now before some eastern city boy asks about MOL... MOL is More Or Less, i.e. approximately. Lots of acreages are sold as xxx acres MOL. The MOL being a "fudge factor" in the absence of a good survey. When land holdings exceed several city blocks for small farms as they do here, measuring perfection is not a big deal.

Pat

 

[Spiveyman]

Put in perspective. A quarter section (160 acres) is a very common size land holding here and certainly not associated with bragin' rights. I don't know a single cattleman with less land than me.

Funny how things are different in different sections of the country. 640 acres here in central KY would cost you several million dollars due to all of the development, but you could run a pretty good size herd on that. My papaw routinely runs about 40 head on a 25 acre stretch of land and can usually get enough hay to winter them too without having to buy any. I have a friend running 45 head on 30 acres, I gave him 6 bales of hay last year, that's all he was short. So 640 acres would support maybe 1,024 head at those rates, except for the whole drought thing this year.

 

[Cacinok]

That section correction thing, odd as it is, at least has a rationale. Come visit Boston sometime and travel on Milk St which now is lined with 40 story office buildings carefully aligned on a road that meanders, literally, like a cow path. Even Bostonians cannot figure out the roads in the colonial section of town. Only the cows understand the logic.

a friend of mine lives in Boston and he has commented on that street. is it named "milk st" b/c it was an old cow path?

 

[Cacinok]

Clint, The description of my property involved a nail in a tree so many feet from the boundary. The tree was removed a couple years ago. Luckily it was not an actual part of the boundary but just a land mark to help find a buried metal pin (vertical rebar) driven below the surface of the edge of the section line.

I have an ongoing problem because a previous surveyor erroneously assumed that my quarter was of standard size. The legal description of my propoerty has a less and except section that describes a 1.2 acre lot cut out of my property that I do not own. Unfortunately the description doesn't match reality and the property lines are off by about 5-6 feet E-W . The lot is sized correctly but the legal description is in error as to its precise location. My "quarter" is about 10-12 feet larger E-W than the standard (2640 ft or half mile.) The bottom line is that after allowing for the quarter being larger and having 1.2 acres cut out it is essentially a wash and I have 160 acres MOL.

Now before some eastern city boy asks about MOL... MOL is More Or Less, i.e. approximately. Lots of acreages are sold as xxx acres MOL. The MOL being a "fudge factor" in the absence of a good survey. When land holdings exceed several city blocks for small farms as they do here, measuring perfection is not a big deal.

Pat

Pat, I've seen that nail in the tree trick and it actually works well, much easier to track down the pins, unless of course the tree disappears. Unfortunately, I've seen situations, like yours, where the surveyor buggers up the survey.

On our present piece of property, the guy who owned the property prior to the guy we bought it from, carved out and sold what was supposed to be 10 acres. When we had it surveyed, it turned out it was actually 9.5. If you added in the extra .5 acre, it would have put the fence line about 15' from our front door, in which case we would not have purchased the house and property. Evidently when they carved out the "10" acres, they just roughly measured themselves. oops. So when we closed our seller had to buy .5 acres and have our legal description redone to include it, so there were two closings and two new legals that our seller had to take care of.

We also found, during the survey, that the fence on the NE corner of our property was 25' N of the pin. The fence eventually, as it travels west, travels south and at some point rejoins the correct property line. The fence has been there for quite some time. I'll leave it, I don't think I'll worry about adversely possessing it either. If our neighbor wants it back, he can move the fence and subsequent large trees that have grown.

Good to see you're still posting away, btw.

Clint.

 

[patrick_g]

Clint, Unfortunately the erroneous survey predated my purchase by a number of years and was now "aged fact" so to speak. There is no gain or loss of land area irrespective of the error. The lot enclosed by the legal description in the "less and except"section of the front page of a two volume 3-4 inch thick abstract of deed is properly described as 150x350 ft. The error is that the legal description doesn't (and never did) match the physical fact.

If you follow the directions given in the abstract of deed you get an identical rectangle as reality, just that it is 5-6 ft off E-W. Makes a difference when it comes to fences. It is a darned if you do darned if you don't dilemma. I don't want to fence where the description says as it puts my cattle fence close to the owner's bedroom window. I prefer giving her a break and fencing compatible with the existing fence.

The rub is that when she sells the new owner will only have the deed for guidance and it will show the N-S fences to be mis located when in fact they were preexisting to the erroneous survey and it is the survey that is in error.

I wonder what it takes to be a surveyor in these parts, a listing in the phone book?

Pat

 

[QRTRHRS]

Like many other, I started out with a 6' Landpride when we bought our 30 acre property. In all, about 25 of the 30 acres were open, some in crops, some overgrown, etc. I fenced off about 4 or 5 acres of the only decent grass to get started.

That 6' was okay for the small pasture but when I started to tackle the fields, well, forget it. I got this farmer to use roundup with no till corn for two years to get rid of the briars, etc. and so I would not have to deal with them.

The spring after his second corn crop, the farmer got sick with cancer and died so I went out and picked up my older 4x4 Case with CAH and a 15' batwing.

Sitting in that cooled cab, listening to the radio, while cutting felt like I died and went to heaven compared to my open station compact.

Even though that 15' mower makes maintaining 25 fenced acres of pasture go pretty quickly, I think a 12' would have been better for ease of getting around.

 

[LBrown59]

Even though that 15' mower makes maintaining 25 fenced acres of pasture go pretty quickly, I think a 12' would have been better for ease of getting around.

How many feet per acre do you need?

 

[Robert_in_NY]

As many that you can afford and still get the job done in a time frame that you set for yourself.

 

[ragkar]

Assuming the 32 acre guy with 4 ft mower is driving at 3 mph and cutting 3.5ft wide per pass, he can mow 924 sq ft at most per minute.
Therefore he will need at the minimum 1508 minutes (25 hrs) to mow 32 acres. Double that to allow for problems and the number is 50 hours.
Of course he will need to mow it once a week!