Land "smoothing" job ... big ruts... best options?

[Cherokee140]

I have been down this road. I have a super bumpy area on my property not quite as big, only about 1-2ac but so bumpy you could not walk back there. Try to mow and you better bring a pocket full of shear pins. As the tractor would fall in the holes the brush hog blades would hit the dirt...sometimes they bust sometimes they don't. Brush hog is so old and I want a new one anyway toyed with the idea of a grade 8 bolt in there....but tearing up a still good machine goes against my grain. We tried the disc. I don't know anything about it but do know the disc itself my 8n will not lift. And the 8n is freshly rebuilt. I used my JD 70 with a 55gal drum full of water tied to the top of the disc and still it would just roll over the bumps. I bet I went over the area 100 times and still nothing...no matter how I had the discs set....real sharp or almost straight. Grass was so thick it just would not cut, and the little trees (none bigger then a fist) the disc just did not work.

Then I tried the box blade....still could not get the results I was after. Not sure if I was just sick and tired of screwing with the disc or what, but I actually gave up on that pretty quick.

My next shot is going to be the tiller....I think that will do it.

I understand how you say so bumpy you can't ride a 4 wheeler. Brush hogging with the 8n it would want to toss you off. Switched to the 650 with the brush hog (it has a low very slow 1st and reverse) and that was the only way you could do it...but it will still stall out the tractor pretty often. I have motorcycles, and use to ride quite a bit, I am no stranger to dirt bikes having ridden in the dirt for over 30 years. But this was just impossible. You really could just crawl over the bumps.

Good luck and keep us updated.

 

[the old grind]

We're pretty sandy here in my nabe, so I've been working food plots into fallow fields with a 7' disc going back to my 23hp CUT. IMO size is as much a matter of what can be easily loaded and hauled to a job. Adding weight (iron or c'ment blocks on a rack) is usually needed to dig into heavier stuff & cut up weed & brush roots on successive passes. Regardless of soil type or state of rest a lot of riff-raff will come up and if any plot was more than 1/2 ac or so I'd want a landscape rake to clear some of that as needed.

IMO, that's a fair of land to recover from where it is to something quad-ably smooth in short time. (by the job or by the hour?) If the customer wants to let 6ac of woods just 'happen' he won't have much choice of what comes up without a LOT of spraying or uprooting saplings that will sprout up from just pieces left behind or other S MI inevitables (poplar, willow, autumn olive, buckthorn, etc). If he wanted a parade field that's one thing, but he might want to plan any paths or 2-tracks ahead of time, and you may get another call someday to clear a way through what's there.

This could be a great place to get comfy with draft control. No doubt the Massey can haul the freight. I'd disc away as suggested above and keep it simple with the customer's real expectations well addressed and fully understood beforehand to keep it simple & make the job fair to all. If watching TSO doesn't inspire the customer to by his own CUT I'd bet the phone will be ringing again one day to put in a food plot.

 

[GManBart]

Here's a chisel plow for you Tim:

Chisel Plow, 5 chisel ripper

 

[streamin]

Here's a chisel plow for you Tim:

Chisel Plow, 5 chisel ripper

I didn't know what those were, how would that differ from the scarifiers on the boxblade?

 

[coobie]

So I just had a job come up that entails smoothing out about 6 acres of old row crop farm land. It looks like someone left the rows with the ruts, and it's been growing wild ever since. We just brush hogged this weekend, and it was really bumpy to drive over. Includes weeds and scrub brush and small scrub trees.

The guy doesn't want it soccer field smooth, but he says he can barely ride his four wheeler over it because it's too bumpy.

So what's the best, and cheapest, option for smoothing it out? Will a disk smooth and level it for me? I was thinking I could spend all day with a tiller and that might do it, but I'm not sure. I also think box blading the whole thing is out of the question, because the vegetation makes it nearly impossible.

Thoughts?

Had my 35 acres logged a few years back log trucks made huge ruts.The only way I got the ruts out was with 6 ft rear rototiller.I tried a box blade and heavy lawn roller after it rained it hardly made a difference.

 

[AaronS]

I didn't know what those were, how would that differ from the scarifiers on the boxblade?

Depth of cut.

 

[flusher]

Cheapest way--tandem disc (so it's easy to make right and left turns) with a lot of added weight (I use 5 gallon plastic buckets filled with concrete) towing a spike harrow or some type of home made drag (I use chain link fence with old tires/rims wired to the fence for added weight). You'll have to make repeated passes over the field in a crisscross pattern to get it smooth.

A more expensive way is with a land plane assuming that you'd need to buy one.

Good luck.

 

[EddieWalker]

When I had some timber land that was planted in pines about ten years before I bought it, I found that all the land had been gone over with something that created grooves in the ground for the pines. Basically it was like driving over never ending speed bumps. I bought a 5 foot 3pt disk for food plots and thought to give it a try dragging it along my roads and trails. The results where night and day better!!!! All I did was go over it several times and the dirt filled in the low spots with what came off the high spots. The tractor and ATV compacted it and left me with roads and trails that I cold drive over quickly and smoothly.

Eddie

 

[Texasmark]

We have had pretty good droughts here for the last few years. Clay cracks open but doesn't fill back in with a rain. Ran cows and had bad hoof print problems. Combine the two and you just couldn't run over it without getting a stomach ache.

I bought a Hay King Pasture Renovator a few years ago. 4 shank for my 57 PTO tractor works fine, probably could stand 5 as I can run the 4 in a mid gear. There is a large coulter to split the ground and a heavy duty ripper shank behind, that you can run as deep as you set it up to about 12" max with the unit tilted. Shanks are about 8 - 10" apart (4 shanks fit a 6' implement).

Two staggered passes with that really loosens the soil without a lot of residue on the surface. I then came back with a spike toothed harrow, the spiked chain link/spike like Small Farm Innovations sells and smoothed it out. Went fast and really really made a difference.

The difference in this and a disc harrow (I have 4 of them of different styles including an offset disc plow) is penetration and residue. You get great penetration on my hard clay with little follow up smoothing required.

My renovator was $1500 new from my local JD dealer. Texas Jim told me that he has one also.

Mark

 

[Supa Dexta]

The fastest and cheapest way to do this 6 acres would be to have someone plough it, and then get to work disking it. It doesn't need to be perfect you said, so no need for land planing, the disks will do a good enough job.. But small/light weight disks would take forever (the ground dries out after each pass and gets harder to cut into with any amount of sod), however once ploughed a couple of passes may be all you need in this case.