BROKE BOTH OF THE BIG BOY TOYS CLEARING LAND!

hey there folks this is josh tony ridge farmer welcome back to the farm it's another beautiful day here in the foothills of the blue ridge mountains and we've got frank on the loader he's pushing up a pile of debris we've done a lot of work check it out huge piece of land we've been clearing so come along today as we give you a little bit of an update and we'll talk you through the process step by step what we did and how we're doing all this and how we're saving topsoil by our future plans here in the next two years so come along have some fun i ain't afraid i ain't afraid to play i ain't afraid to get the job done and do it my own damn way i ain't [Music] okay guys if this is your first time the stony ridge farm channel welcome to the channel we're building a farm we're building a 150 acre farm here in the foothills of the blue ridge mountains of north carolina and you're following our journey here so where we are right now there is a section of bottom land and you can see this is kind of a low area it's a little bit of a flood plain that's the first spot that we started clearing we had to have an excavator in order to do that frank is on a caterpillar 953 loader which is good for pushing and good for moving dirt we decided that we didn't need bulldozers most of all because frank doesn't run a bulldozer frank runs a loader so we rented the excavator we came in we pulled stumps out of the wet areas like this wet area right here and you can see some gray soil that's some really wet clay soil frank will come in and back drag and dress all this up and then we'll come back with the tr3 rake and we'll clean this all up again and you can see pine trees sporadically placed throughout here this is going to be cow pasture okay so this cow pasture right here will have shade trees those pine trees will grow up over the next three years or so and we'll have plenty of shade trees this is a windrow a windrow of debris what we're doing with our debris is we're gonna leave it here for three years what that's gonna do is allow all the tiny sticks and twigs to compost and rot and make more topsoil then we'll come back in with the excavator we'll pick through all this stuff we'll take out the woody debris we'll burn the woody debris and make biochar and spread that out on the land and we'll bury and or smooth over all of the dirt and the new topsoil that we've created here by building these windrows and this thing is huge you'll see by the drone footage it is absolutely huge so this is probably a quarter mile long uh 12 foot high 15 foot wide pile of brush and stumps and debris so that's what that is and that will make awesome awesome compost over the next few years uh basically from this point you're going to see the drone fly over the next section that we're gonna do from this point frank has to dress it up then i'll come in again with the tractor and the landscape rake and the tr3 rake and grass seed and we'll seed all this stuff and get it ready for pasture now you might be wondering why we're not burying the debris or not burning the debris right now well it's all stumped so the first step we made here was we cut the timber on this property about four years ago something like that then we let the timber rot the stumps rot basically we cut the timber sold it used the money from the timber to clear the land was it enough no not not nearly enough so we probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 000 in this 22 acre pasture so we cut the timber and we waited several years and that's what it looked like just weeds and a little bit of stump growth okay and this is what it looks like once i go through with the excavator and flip out all the stumps so you can see that now frank will come in behind me roll these stumps into a pile that we can burn and we also have all the woody debris in this field so we're across the way this is a five acre field and you'll get a good drone shot of all this but this field right here was something that we cleared completely and piled all the dirt up in the windrows and all the debris up into windrows and that debris composted over the last six months or so and we have basically little stumps so these stump balls that you see right here are recently plucked out they turn into a little stump ball uh well here's one right here kind of similar to that so the whole bottom of the root system rotted out on that stump ball so we'll push all that stuff up and we'll burn that and again this is about a five acre section it's not all the way done yet but it will be done frank has to come in and back drag it and push up the burn piles so on this section of land here again cut over cut over section of land here we were going to replant in pine trees the loblolly pines those that's what you see right here they're probably about 10 feet high right now we we replanted this whole area in loblolly pine trees it wasn't very expensive we had it done and if we wanted to keep it in timber we could keep it in timber but we decided that we would be better to clear it and raise our cattle on here because we could make a little bit more money on the farm by raising livestock on this land than we could by harvesting the trees in 35 years so it's cool it's awesome come along let's toss the drone up and have some [Music] fun [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] well guys check out the progress awesome the place looks great we are both broke down both of us are totally broke down right now so frank's loader the water pump went bad and frank's loader he's got it opened up i'll show you where that is real quick so this is the big cat six cylinder and right down in there is the water pump water was squirting out the weep hole so that went bad it gave him a little symptom yesterday and he saw his volt light come on and off and what happened was it was spraying out onto the belts and a hose just broke on the rental unit down there so both machines are down i get a lot of comments from folks saying josh you should just buy a cat loader or josh you should just buy a used a good used excavator well if i buy this equipment i got to keep it up and you're not going to find a good used machine like this that isn't going to break i mean this stuff gets beat up it gets worked really really hard and that's why i don't own it i rent it or i hire it i'm not going to buy this equipment and try to maintain it and keep it up myself it's just too much work guys so i hope you enjoyed the video today guys be sure you pound that like button subscribe the channel come on back and see us we're going to take this pasture this is going to be pasture we're going to take this we're going to smooth it out we're going to throw down grass seed either drill down grass seed with our woods precision super cedar or we'll broadcast it and all of this in three weeks will be luscious and green and awesome cool see you next time that's the way it's supposed to be stony [Music]