Clearing Land, Fence lines and Brush with Skid Steer | Steep Grade!

OH, FOLKS, TODAY ON THE STONY Ridge Farm Channel, oh, we're going to try and clean this mess up with a skid steer. It's going to be fun. You guys are going to learn. We're going to have a good time. Woo! Hey folks, this is Josh Stony Ridge Farmer. Welcome back to another gorgeous day here on the Stony Ridge Farm. This is Peanut. Peanut is a Gale RT210 skid steer. And what we're going to be doing, well, compact track loader to be exact. What we're going to be doing today is clearing some pathways through the woods back here so we can section off different areas of pasture for the cattle. This is going to be a real fun video. We're going to be doing a lot of work. Probably not a lot of gibber jabber and talk until the end. I'll tell you exactly what we've got going on. Right now I've got the rock picker on this machine and as you can tell, we call this the Stony Ridge Farm for a reason, guys. We'll get you a little footage of the rock picker as we get ready, get all of our equipment together, and start cutting trails through the woods. Woo! Welcome to the farm, folks. This is a 150-acre first generation cattle farm. It is huge. It is absolutely overwhelming. I moved from a third of an acre in town onto this piece of property. Now, I did grow up in the country and I came back here in my mid-30s because I wanted to get away from town and the hustle and bustle of town because it's not a hustle and bustle in town compared to this. I wanted to get back out into the fresh air. You can do this. If there's any inspiration for you guys to have, you can do it. I'm a normal average guy. I can do it. You can do it. We all can do it and you can learn a little bit about it here on the Stony Ridge Farm Channel. So, I hope you're subscribed and I hope you'll watch this video all the way to the end. So, this is my Gale RT210. It is a What is it? 71 horsepower, I think is what it Yep, 71 horsepower machine. Under here, in case you never seen one of these, is the engine. Everything's good there. We need to check the oil prior to any work we're going to do here and looking at the dipstick down there. Looks very good. Looks within normal operating range. It is black. Now, why is that oil black? Well, it's a diesel engine. Diesel engine oil gets black. My cattle are moved all the time. I've got around 50 cows. I have around 85 acres of fenced usable pasture. This is within a fence. This is within a fence. This is pasture. This is forest. These are planted pines that I planted about 7 years ago, something like that. I had a crew come in. We cut some timber. We cleared some land and I planted these pines. This hillside is way too rocky to use for anything for grazing. That's why I did that. Now, I have animals which move in the summertime every 12 hours. We have 90 different individual paddocks on the farm, which makes for 45 days of rest so our grass can recover. Now, we are in a ear late late winter. Getting ready to cross over into spring. We don't have any green grass right now. We just don't have it. The cows are over on the other side of the farm eating hay. That's what they do. You want to see more of the cows? I'll be links at the end of this video. What we've got to do here is come off the corner of this fence right here. So, this is a corner post. That's a brace right here and all this fencing came from Farm Fence Solutions. Good friends of mine. farmfencesolutions.com. You can go off of this post and what we've got to do is clear a pathway through the woods right through here and you see it's kind of rough, but we've got a natural path that the cows have been using and we're going to go all the way straight down through the woods and you see there's another field over there. So, we're going to go down through the woods and back up the other side. Let me just walk you down through here. See how rough it is? Pretty darn rough, right? But let's get steer. We'll make quick work of this. We'll get in here with the tooth bucket and we'll smooth all this out and we'll cut our path all the way down through here. So, let me show you which way the path is going to go. So, this will be a temporary fence just like we use out in the pastures with a polywire. Poly electric wire. We're running an electric fence. Put a little step-in fence post here. Step-in fence post there. Step-in down there. Guys, you can see it's pretty opened up in here. The fence doesn't have to be perfectly straight. It just has to get through here. All right? This is our creek down here and this is the only section of land on the farm that the cows have access to the creek. They can drink from the creek. So, each one of these sections in this upper field here will be 1 acre and they'll be able to come down to the creek and drink and have 1 acre and they'll have that 1 acre in the summertime for 12 hours. Next 12. Next 12. Next 12. So, what my goal is here is to come down in here and get across this creek in the best possible manner that way we can get our cows sectioned off. Cows have actually made me a good creek crossing. I will not put my machinery anywhere near the creek. So, the post will come down doop doop doop doop doop doop doop doop. Right down here, right down there, and back up the other side. This is where we pushed all the debris or part of the debris from the field clearing. We're going to go all the way up through here where we've got this field cleared. What I have to do is take the skid steer through here and push this stuff all off to the side. And that will open us up. Woo! Goodness. So, once I get done on this side I'm going to go right through here. I'm going to clear that out and you'll watch me as I work work work. Push it to the side. Push it to the side and I have a trail all the way through. Today will be the first time I've ever done this. This fencing will go straight through there. Then I'll go down one more section and it'll go straight through there. And another section, another section. This is an 11 to 12-acre field. So, there should be 12 individual paddocks right here. Ooh. Check that guy out. Praying mantis egg. This is the field that we are segmenting off. This is the worst field on the whole farm. We're going to turn it into the best field on the whole farm. So, let's hop on the skid steer, get busy cutting paths. Come on, Lucius Merriweather. There you go. Good boy. There we go. What's that you say? Always wear your hearing protection. You don't want to be that old man that's What's that? Huh? Can't have that. Uh-oh. You okay? Seems destructive, right? But, look at this mess compared to what we just made right through here. Now, there's a little bit of work that needs to be done. I need to bring a little chainsaw down here and a rake and rake this out just a little bit, but the cows will help with that, also. Um the chainsaw needs to come down to help pull some of these little stobs that are hard to work with, but pretty much we've got a straight shot right down there to where we want to go. We can either cut straight through here or cut down down through here. Right there is a creek crossing and we're going to head over to the other side. This literally is only taking Well, that took me 10 minutes. I mean, bam, just got it done. Just dig dig dig dig dig, push push push. Now, pushed up one of those pines, those beautiful pines that I talked about, that I planted myself. If your trees aren't spaced far enough apart, one will thrive and the other one won't. You can see how this pine is empty on the backside right there. The trees are too close. We want about 20 ft between trees. So, if we put them too close together, they won't thrive and they'll grow really slow. Now, this tree has an opportunity to grow faster, better, and stronger and get a better root hold. I don't want to tear out trees that I don't have to. However, cutting down through there and actually, you know what? I'm going to take a few more out. I'm going to get back down in here and I'm going to knock out that little cluster right there. Those are poplar trees. Those little poplar trees are almost growing like weeds around here. So, we got to get rid of them and make ourselves a nice clear path. We also want to be able to get the ATV and the tractor down through here, so we can maintain this. So, I think what needs to happen is I need to go down in, circle back, and push these over that way into all that debris. That's what I'm going to try to do. And then we'll circle around the pond back over the other side. I don't care who you are. That was fun and spooky, man. That is the most tipsy I've ever had this machine and uh look at the results. Look at it. Holy cow, would you look at that? Let's go down here and take a look. Uh man, uh the TriL bucket performed awesome. TriL Manufacturing, made in the USA, baby, out of Missoura. Good stuff. Good people, too, man. Just salt of the earth. So, this um is the pathway that I cut for this side and you can see over there really worked out nicely. I will not have enough room to drive down in here. I can get an ATV or a side-by-side down through here, but uh maybe the tractor, but uh I don't know. I don't know if I need the tractor down through here. I did want to widen it out over there. It was a lot easier, but we got a lot bigger trees over here to fool with. And big rocks, guys. You can see that machine will not pick that rock up. That thing weighs probably Well, it might pick it up. But, it probably weighs as much as a Chevy Chevette, if you remember those. Escort? Yeah. I had a few rocks in here just like this critter. I could just easily enough take it by hand, get those rocks rolled up out of the way. Awesome. Now, I have a clearer path all the way through. You can see over there where I just cleared. I can bring that line straight down through, right through there, up through here, and straight all the way across that field. And my friends, that is it for today. That literally took me 15 minutes. The other side took about 20 minutes. I do have a little work to do down in here. Uh this is where the biggest tree on the entire farm was, and it was right there. It was a poplar tree, and that thing was huge, guys. But, it was hollow. Hollow in the inside. It was absolutely unusable. Bummer. Total bummer. This is an area I call Fern Gully. We'll see more of this in a future video on the Stony Ridge Farm as I open that trail up, and I open this trail up so we can get back in here and enjoy our beautiful forest. Thank you guys so much. Hit that like button. Let me know. Tell me if you enjoyed the day. This was really fun. That was awesome. If I'd have known it was going to be that easy, I'd have been out here doing it all winter long. Except for it's too muddy. And if that's muddy, I ain't getting that skid steer out. Take care, guys. We'll see you next time on the Stony Ridge. WOO! WOO! Wait a minute. You're a fun guy, aren't you? Ooh, that's a pretty cool mushroom. Man, I'm obsessed with mushrooms, new types of mushrooms. Every time I do something like this, I'm also looking for arrowheads. Hope you guys enjoyed the video today. See you next time. Woo! Check out these links.