Farm Information: Equipment: Dirt work / Cleanup
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In the off-times of year, we spend considerable time doing dirt work, farm/field cleanup, mowing and other tasks that improve our field efficiencies and improve land values for everyone involved with the farm. Often this includes a lot of time rolling up a 100 years worth of barbwire that seems to encircle every farm field and most time is buried (along with posts) along the edges of fields.
Terry Kastens and Chuck Felzien rolling up buried barbwire in the fall of 2008. In this area almost every field was used for grazing cattle at some point in time. Unfortunately, most of these fences haven't been used or kept up for 30-40 years and consequently become buried in the soil to be found by our planting equipment, tractor tires or worse yet our stripper headers.
Lester Yoos stands on his D5 Cat. Lester spends considerable time on this rig both on our farm as well as doing custom work for other farmers in the area. This Cat gets it's fill of broken down Cottonwoods every year.
Here is Lester digging the whole on the backside of a big tree so that he can get it to fall exactly where he wants it to.
Taking down an old, broken down Cottonwood along the Sappa Creek. See more of this project here.
In the winter of 2007-2008, we bought an old Allis grader and it has been a great addition to the farm. We use it a lot for fixing field entrances, trail roads, pivot roads, repairing gullies and washes, as well as general road maintenance.
Here is Chuck pushing out Yucca plants with the 4430. On this field, we needed to straighten two edges out to improve field efficiency so we first pulled up the old fence, then took out the yucca plants. Although we are notillers, we use a 20' disk to break the sod and smooth out the former pasture ground.
As our local population peaked in the 1930's, there are a multitude of old, unsafe and unsightly farmsteads. We try to save what we can and then burn and bury the rest. This was an old farm house located a couple miles south of the farm. In the background was an old barn that we determined was worth saving.
This is a picture of the Walsh school located 1/8 mile east of the farm. In 2002, this building was on the verge of having to be knocked down. It was used as a school until 1953.
We decided that as a historic landmark in our area that the building was worth saving, so we made a lot of structural repairs, cleaned up the trees, put on a new roof, rebuilt the traditional window screens and gave the whole building a good scraping and then a couple of coats of paint. At some point we want to stencil the historic information about this building onto the side of it.
We are really excited this year with a purchase of a Berti BTAP200 88" flail mower from Beaver Valley Supply in Atwood, KS. This mower will allow us to do a much better job mowing ditches, field edges and other tough areas where traditional mowers struggle. Picture from: Wikco.com.We always have a big list of cleanup tasks to do each year and this year will be no different. With miles of old fence still to pull up, old water wells that need capped and sealed, old farmsteads and junk to be buried, we try to spend as much time as possible every year performing such land improvement tasks.
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