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Farm Drainage Tile Installation to Boost Profits
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Jan 25, 2024
In this video, I take you on a detailed tour of my farm drainage tile installation project from last spring and summer. Watch and learn how the impressive equipment behind this drainage tile installation operation can turn a wet, unproductive field into a highly profitable ones. A couple weeks after this drainage tile went in, we had a serious rainstorm. It was amazing to watch the water gushing non-stop out of the drainage tile pipe outlets – water that normally would have been stuck in the soil of my fields, making everything wet and soggy, keeping good growth from happening. READ MY POPULAR ARTICLES ABOUT: Polyurethane Finish - https://bit.ly/powerbuffing DIY Hoop House Plans - https://bit.ly/hoophouseplans Submersible Pump Installation - https://bit.ly/pumpinstallation Air-Drying Wood Tips - https://bit.ly/wooddrying How to Build a Table - https://bit.ly/tablebuilding How to Stain a Deck - https://bit.ly/deckstain Choosing Waterproof Outdoor Glue - https://bit.ly/exterioradhesives How To Build A Wheelchair Ramp - https://bit.ly/wheelchairrampplans SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/BLRchannel WATCH MY POPULAR VIDEO: How to Cut Perfect Miter Joints https://youtu.be/0wnjJ-Xi5FU WATCH MORE BAILEY LINE ROAD: Winter Tips - https://bit.ly/2rpnUcm
View Video Transcript
0:00
In this video I'm going to give you a tour of something that's pretty exciting I think
0:04
and that's the installation of some drainage tiles here on our farm
0:08
Drainage tiles are these perforated flexible pipes you see in the background
0:13
They're perforated so they have holes in them. The idea is you install a network of these and they're all sloped consistently to a certain outlet
0:22
and you drain the excess water from the fields. So about half of my fields are too wet which means there's standing water in the spring
0:30
and it makes for a slow start, cold, slow soil warm up in the spring
0:36
So we're going to fix that. We're going to fix that. I've been working with a drainage tile contractor
0:43
Lyndon Martin is his name and his team and he's got machines that are going to install these things
0:50
But right now it's early July. I'm going to take you back a few months when Lyndon was out here before
0:57
surveying the place for elevation because these drainage tiles need to slope consistently
1:02
in order to work properly. So he has a very sophisticated GPS thing that works with his four-wheeler
1:09
and he took a survey of the property turned it into a drainage plan
1:14
We got a plan now and now we're putting that plan into practice. So but let's go back in time a few months and I'll show you a little bit about that whole
1:22
surveying business. So it's May the 4th right now and this is the beginning of a tile drainage project
1:31
here in this third field of mine. It's the wettest field and there's a lot of potential here for making it grow better
1:37
So I've got a tile contractor guy coming in there. He's going to be making a drainage plan
1:44
He needs to know how deep the soil is in different places and that's why we have this little excavator here
1:50
So it's the beginning of something that I hope will help this place grow even better
1:58
I'll keep you posted as things unfold. So what's happening here is that our drainage contractor Lyndon Martin
2:08
is driving back and forth across these fields. He's in the field on the other side of the trees there but he's driving back and forth
2:18
about every 20 or 30 feet with a special device that will very accurately measure elevation
2:28
And that pile of soil you see there is one of a number that have been dug
2:34
He needs to know the soil depth because these drainage tiles need to slope consistently down
2:40
That's how they drain the land. They provide a place for the water to run to and to run down in the drainage tiles which are perforated plastic pipes
2:52
So you can hear off in the distance. Lyndon driving back and forth and then there's the backhoe doing its thing
3:06
So this device here. Something to do with the GPS system that he's using
3:15
He tells me that it can measure elevation to within less than a centimeter in accuracy
3:22
So pretty impressive stuff. My next thing is to hear from Lyndon and see what he thinks he can do
3:31
Because as I said the bedrock can stop us. You know if there's some something to do with bedrock that's going to prevent the consistent
3:40
slope of those drainage tiles then that could be a problem that could short circuit the whole job
3:46
So here you can see an overview of all the fields before anything has happened
3:51
We've decided to go ahead the drainage plan looks good. But we haven't actually started to lay any tiles yet so this is kind of the before shot
4:00
Any pathways and such that you see in the fields now that's mostly caused by cattle just walking
4:06
in the same place all the time. Here you can see some more rows of the drainage tile
4:12
This is the four inch stuff for the most part. There's about six miles of this that's going to eventually end up in the soil
4:20
Six miles and we're going to be doing 27 acres in total
4:24
So it's a lot of pipe. They're installed every 40 feet which is pretty far apart but it's surprising how well it works
4:33
And here you can see they've started in on some of the construction
4:38
As you'll see later in the video there's a machine for setting tiles into the ground
4:43
without having to dig a trench first. That's what you can see to the right here it's called a tile plow
4:50
It's got a spool of the drainage tile on it. And when it's actually laying the tile which is not doing right at the moment
4:59
that tile will come unfurled or unspooled from that and be put right into the ground
5:07
at the precise depth required. And that's where the GPS information from the survey comes in
5:14
That tile plow there is computer controlled at least in terms of
5:19
the height that it puts tile into the ground. And that's kind of the genius of the whole system
5:24
Taking that survey information and putting it into an actual elevation for the pipe
5:31
This tile plow is more impressive in real life than it might seem on the video here
5:35
It's got 550 horsepower. It weighs more than 85,000 pounds. And all of that is necessary because that tile plow does a very hard job
5:47
pulling that plow point through soil. Sometimes very heavy and strong and rigid soil like you see here
5:56
Here you can see Lyndon threading in some of the four inch drainage tile
6:02
into the actual part that will put it down into the ground
6:07
It kind of goes over a pulley which is what he's working on now
6:11
And it will eventually go down right to the tip of that plow point
6:17
So that's where the tile gets deposited. Here you can see this tractor here delivers the rolls of tile
6:26
out to the tile plow as needed. And if you saw at the front there were some discs
6:30
They do use those discs to level out some of the soil
6:35
Here's a closer view. Tremendous horsepower here. The tracks as you can see they have great big paddles on them
6:44
so that they can grip well enough to do what you're seeing here
6:50
The tile here is probably three feet, four feet down maybe. And this is heavy soil too
6:56
And this sod has not been broken up in living memory in at least 50 or 60 years
7:01
So it's about as hard as ground gets. And this rig has no trouble moving right through
7:06
This is something of an interesting angle because you actually get to see the plow part of things close up
7:13
Here Lyndon's just pulling it out of the ground. He's going to be going to another place now
7:19
But that's what it looks like. You can see the pipe going down over that pulley
7:23
and heading on down to the bottom of the plow where it gets deposited into the soil
7:30
So he's just backing up right now to start a new run
7:35
According to a tile drainage plan that he made from that survey
7:42
everything was all mapped out including the position of the tiles and reality conformed to that plan pretty well
7:52
Now here you can see just how messy things are when it's done
7:59
If I had just left this it would eventually settle down but it still would not be all that smooth
8:05
I spent some time after the job was done here using a rototiller on the tractor to kind of clean it up
8:10
But this is the spot that you saw earlier. A lot of tile runs are going to come together in this one area
8:19
So this spot has the most disturbance. And it did take a fair amount to get it all cleaned up
8:28
but you can see there's probably half a dozen runs coming together
8:33
in the same spot in this general area. This is a better view of the place where all the pipes come together
8:41
into that kind of main outlet. In this case the main outlet is going under the fence
8:47
which is just about where the soil stops. That's why the pioneers put the fence there and stopped clearing the land
8:52
And here it is under the fence draining the bulk of the fields
8:57
There are four other outlets draining other areas but you can see the main outlet here heading off into the fields
9:06
The big challenge we faced here as I touched on earlier was bedrock
9:11
You know where I live, Manitoulin Island, it's a limestone island and there are some pockets of great soil
9:18
but then there's other areas that have no soil. It's just bare limestone. We're kind of in between there
9:24
Most of the fields here have anywhere from two to five or six feet of soil on them
9:29
So the issue was could we maintain that consistent slope of drainage tile
9:35
with the presence of the bedrock there? We didn't know what the bedrock was going to do between the test holes that we dug back in May
9:43
and the excavator here is actually scraping soil right off the rock. These drainage tiles are pretty well right on the rock
9:52
so we couldn't have done this without any less soil than we have
9:56
I was relieved and thankful that we were, we did have enough soil to actually drain this properly
10:02
And here I am inside the cab of the tile plow. It's, as you can see, that's Lyndon there
10:10
It's kind of a hybrid device or machine. It's certainly very mechanical as you can see but it's also digital
10:20
We do happen to be in an area where the bedrock does rise up
10:25
This is the area where we could not drain one acre. So the original plan called for 28 acres of drainage
10:33
We got in 27 and this is the area where we kind of had to lay tile up to
10:41
the area of flat shallow soil where the flat rock rose up to but stopping at
10:47
So we, it's quite a bumpy ride in there. You can see when it's driving that spool is turning
10:57
because the tile is getting used as it drives along and works quite well
11:04
Lyndon is telling me that he is the third generation to be in the land draining business like this
11:09
His grandfather started the business and at that time drainage tile contractors had to make their own clay pipes
11:19
in order to lay into the ground. We do have things a lot easier now with the perforated plastic pipes
11:26
that will last forever and do a fantastic job. So it's kind of a combination of the high-tech
11:34
meeting farmland and making that farmland more productive. They generally, so you can probably count on 25 to 50 percent increase in productivity
11:46
from wetland that is being drained. That screen is pretty important. It guides the all-important placement or it shows the placement of the tile
11:59
So the green line is the tile pipe. The bottom dotted line is the rock and the top dotted line is the soil level
12:08
We don't want to get any closer to the surface of the soil than two feet
12:13
So Lyndon can see pretty well, see so to speak, what's going on down below and adjust things accordingly
12:22
But dealing with a shallow soil situation like we have is made enormously better by having this kind of digital information
12:33
So you can really put tile anywhere that can possibly accommodate it
12:42
So it's surprising to me how accurately the tile installation conformed to that drainage plan
12:58
You can see there's a lot of precision here because the position of the tile plow is determined by the GPS as well
13:07
So not just the depth of the tile but where the tile plow is actually installing the tiles
13:12
And it's kind of pretty actually. There's some disturbance here of course
13:17
It's got a green up and everything but it kind of looking at it from the air like this
13:23
kind of reminds me of the Nazca lines or something like that. There's no pattern to it but it is interesting to see
13:29
And it'll be especially interesting to see how the fields produce better over the years
13:37
We graze cattle. We graze beef cattle intensively on this pasture. And we have numbers
13:45
Annual gain for instance on the pasture. There's 40 acres of pasture here
13:50
We're making full use of all of it to the, you know, as much as we can
13:56
So we're boosting fertility. We're doing rotational grazing, frost seeding. I may even get into some irrigation actually
14:04
I have a water source that I could use. That will come. But 40 acres
14:09
The record so far of annual gain from the grazing period of middle of May to the end
14:16
of September is about 11,000 pounds. So the cattle weighed 11,000 pounds more when they went off than when they went on
14:24
I'm thinking we can bring that up to maybe 15,000 or so just based on the tile work we're
14:31
doing here. We'll see. Notice those piles of dirt that are dug out of the ground kind of along one of the runs
14:39
Well, that's where a connection needed to be made. Some sort of a junction maybe involving a Y, sometimes Ts
14:49
Most of the tile goes in with the plow like you can see happening here
14:53
But the excavator does need to do some work to make, to clear the soil away to make the
14:58
connections in the various junctions. So where the tile was installed is called a tile run
15:06
And this is pretty typical about what's left behind. So it's fairly rough
15:10
As I said before, it would settle on its own, but I wanted to smooth it
15:14
And I have since smoothed it. There to the left, you can see a drainage outlet that makes use of a sinkhole, which
15:22
is a kind of an area in a rock crack where soil had been washing down a natural drain
15:27
so to speak. And they made use of two sinkholes. For outlets in different parts of the project
15:33
But yeah, lots of big, ugly chunks of sod here. This is the first time I've ever had land drained, so I didn't really know what to expect
15:41
But more experienced people tell me that this actually isn't too bad. It can get a lot rougher than this
15:47
But it is surprisingly quick and easy to clean it up once the earth gets smooth
15:54
I used a tractor mounted rotor tiller and some chain, some chain hair
15:59
Some chain harrows. And that did a good job. There you can see that blue protective cage there on one of the, on one of the outlets
16:08
that's that's in the middle of the field. A week or two after we had the tiles installed, we got a lot of rain and it was very satisfying
16:17
to see how well these tiles actually drain the land. The water was just gushing out of all five outlets, just like it was supposed to
16:28
You can see one here. This would be the most northerly outlet
16:34
I haven't lived with this for very long. Only, you know, one heavy rain spell
16:41
But water did gush out of there even faster. And you can see the tile runs are being worked down
16:44
They're going to start to grow in. Everything's going to look great. And if all goes well, we'll have some more productive fields with this tile job paying
16:53
for itself in the end
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