I HIT SOMETHING BIG WITH THE VENTRAC!!

hey there folks this is Josh Stoney Ridge farmer welcome to the farm this morning today we're going to be working a day in the life on the Stoney Ridge so this is just one of the days that I'm not making videos about miraculous crazy things we've got to work on the ventrac a little bit the tough cut one of the blades I hit a rock or something with it something's not quite right we're not mowing as efficiently as we could be we need to be running about three and a half miles an hour in the field and we're running about one and a half miles an hour unacceptable we got to get rocking and rolling with that we're going to be working with the Massey Ferguson 240 tractor here we're going to be doing some aerating in the fields that we've already cut we got a good rainstorm last night so the ground is nice and soft so we can make our pastures look like our lawn so a whole lot of the science behind growing good pastures falls right into play with growing a good lawn a beautiful green lawn and we'll show you a little bit of what we're doing today we'll have some fun a day in the life on the Stoney Ridge all right [Music] first thing we got to start with is coffee even though it's hot out here I still gotta have my morning coffee we've got to get the tools out of the shop here I'm gonna show you how the tough cut raises up on the ventrac it's pretty cool very handy mower no zero turn does this this thing flips right up it's really interesting and really fun easy to work on so first thing we'll do when we get ready to tip up this apparatus on the front this is called the tough cut it's like a bush hog brush cutter for the front of the ventrac and if this is your guys first time seeing the ventrac this is a twenty four point eight horsepower articulating tractor it's really fun and it's what we're using to maintain the whole farm this year basically the only thing we can't do with it is cut hay so we'll take this little cover off probably don't have to do this but I'd do it so it doesn't beat up the front of the machine we'll take that off sit it over here and the Kubota next thing we'll do is there's a bar right here we'll reach them we'll pull this bar up and that releases the belt tension on the machine right here so we'll release belt tension next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna start the tractor up and we'll raise the deck brake is full we bring the deck to its highest position and we'll pull some pins right here there are four pins to pull so our pin locations are here here here and here very simple if you can get your pincers on there sometimes this requires a pair of needlenose pliers pull them out we're gonna save two pins to help hold the deck up once we get the pins removed so this is how the tough cut tilts up you want to do this basically right after you kill the engine so that you've got oh I did it again a day in the life this is real life there's a kickstand on here I'll show you and I just got the kickstand hung up so in order to flip this deck all the way up the kickstand needs to be down into the middle position or the low position now I've got it hung up right here and I've got to fix that this is a no-holds-barred day man this is what really happens on the farm setbacks like this take ten minutes to fix or two minutes to fix but their setbacks ventrac recommends two people to lift this deck oh this is a pain in the butt did this very same thing the other day erry back down I don't recommend you do that so it's just so simple we just lift this up lower it down and that's it but I forgot my back again raise up the deck if we go and drop our pin into place it's a bit of a struggle there we go now we've got a pin in place to hold the deck up just like this as we pull the blades off or access them or see what the heck is going on something going on underneath here so I've been in this situation before and I've raised the deck up on the ventrac and then start scratching my head as to which way the blades turn because they're sharp on both sides so on a pulley on the other side here I put an arrow to show which way they turn so these two blades actually turn this way and this other blade turns the opposite way so this blade closest to the right hand side turns the opposite way and you can see it turning very cool now the reason it works like this is because it basically pulls everything to the center of the machine and then the center blade basically pulverizes or chops it up and that's what I'm having a little bit of an issue with is the center blade I'm leaving a big pile of grass but it's not pulverizing it like I'd like it to so I'm checking to see if there's anything loose or dull or anything ridiculous that I see could be a problem the first thing I see is I creamed a rock with this blade right here and I've got to remove it real quick and sharpen it I have some blades on standby so I may end up just pulling the blade off and putting a new blade on because you know on rainy days I'll sharpen these blades I'll have everything ready to rock and roll and that way I can just do a quick removal and install and roll with it another thing we're going to do these are solid tires we're going to be unbolting the wheel assembly and we're gonna move it up probably yeah 2 inches or so something like that that way we don't scalp the grass quite as low as we're doing and we can roll with the mowing we can just get out there and go hopefully we can go three and a half to five miles an hour with this thing in optimum running condition but if you don't have it in optimum condition then this is what you run into it's not cutting good so when you hit rocks with lawn mower blades it breaks stuff what we'll be using is our big old Dewalt impact and we have the adapter kit so you can use the new style batteries with the old style tool so we'll rock and roll get this off now in case you don't know if one blade spins the opposite way that means that one of them are reverse-thread so the reverse thread is the one that spins the backwards way so we'll go in and remove the crappiest blade first and we'll inspect the rest of them we may hit it with a bench grinder real quick and we may get out the workshop and really sharpen them razor sharp so that I can move on with it it really makes a huge huge difference having ultra ultra sharp blades when you're bush hogging with a machine like this or when you're mowing your lawn if you can get that blade SuperDuper sharp it really helps your grass and it really helps speed up the process so something that's very important and your deck needs to be level and the tire pressure needs to be the same now these are solid tires but the finished mower has tires that hold air has pneumatic tires and you have to make sure that the pressures are equal on each one of these tires or you will get a scalped lawn which you don't want you want it laser straight kind of remember it's reverse threaded this is the blade that's causing us grief nasty this is a brand new blade I do not remember hitting a rock like that the way this machine works is if one of them spins the opposite way and both edges are sharp gonna get some science here then all I have to do is switch these two and replace one so I can get away with doing that once before putting all three new sharp blades on so that's what we're gonna do we're actually going to remove and swap out this middle one here I'm gonna make sure yeah this guy's sharp is a this can be all we're gonna do is switch blades and you can see this is the one that we've been using and this is the new nicely finished edge so we should be very very happy with our cutting do a little visual inspection of the last blade and it seems to be pretty good it's not it's not rock star shape but I think it's good enough to get the job done so once again this is where pays to have the right tools got a impact socket and an impact extension oh and our impact driver we were doing this with a regular ranch it'd take me forever this is a 9/16 loosened four bolts and we'll raise it up she's got a little bit of weight to her we're bringing it up two notches and once we get one bolt and nut started should stay in place give me a little more detail here in a second our cutting height now should be somewhere in the neighborhood of four and a half inches maybe five so we'll repeat this process with the other one and basically all we're doing is aligning these nuts with different holes raising the deck up and then when we get ready to slide our pins back in our deck will be about that much higher that'll make us roll through this a whole lot faster and the whole goal is just to take the top off of the grass and to cut the lespedeza we've got some lespedeza that's getting ready to seed out I don't want it to seed out I don't want the weeds to seed out so that's why we're mowing vigorously we have never ever ever let this grass in our lawn grow up and spit out seed and look at it look at how good it's doing look at the root structure you really can't see the root structure but you can see that is rock star man that's what we want our hay fields and our pastures to look like so what we're doing is intensively mowing feeding the land with the grass clippings and the weed clippings and cutting it before the weeds spit out seeds so that we can reduce our weed load without sprays that's the plan and it keeps sift Pearlie away so our deck is ready to come back down I'll give it a little lean pop that pin out and then slowly lower this this is more of a two-person job but I think we got it so here we are at the masse 240 and I have to check the oil we just changed the oil in this thing and it's clean as a whistle but I want to make sure we just service the tractor and I saw guidelines that said six quarts six and a half quarts 7 quarts and seven and a half quarts so we ran the tractor for a little bit we actually replace the fuel filters and the oil filter everything's been serviced lubricated ready to rock and roll with this tractor so oil checked out good there's no leaks in the fuel filter area so we'll fire it up so before we take out to the other side of the farm we'll let this tractor sit in here and warm up I got to wipe my face off and put on some sunblock on the back of my neck my chest and everything because it's hot and middle of the day this hat serves a purpose it might look like crap but the reason it looks like crap is because I pull it down where the Sun is blast in my face don't want skin cancer got to protect ourselves so we put some SPF 100 on the ventrac now has a canopy which saves us a whole lot we can get out in the middle of the day and mow in the shade awesome it's actually better on me in the hot hot Sun when it's directly overhead than it is when the sun's going down pretty cool so this field here is about four and a half to five acres will throw the drone up in the air it's gonna take us about an hour hour and ten minutes to do this section then we've got another section across the road that we've already mowed and we'll go ahead and do that now we're doing this after we mow because sometimes this will turn up rocks and sticks and stuff like that and we want to be able to drive over it with the Kubota clean up the rocks and sticks that way we don't in them next time we mow so we're establishing past year this was a briar patch it was all weeds little saplings trees two years ago amazing hopefully I can find some footage and I'll show you some before and after I hope a habit [Music] this thing also does a great job picking up trash so it's getting hot and we've still got quite a bit of work to do what we had out here were a bunch of cedar trees and you can see a cedar just does not right so it's pretty in there nice and pretty and red but we're pulling up a few rocks here and there and a few sticks like that in every beer can that was chucked out the window for the last 30 years has stuck on this thing so let's talk to you a little bit about why we're here rating and look at the soil here okay this soil is just basically clay and what we're trying to do here is we're trying to penetrate that three inches down into the ground with this aerator the aerator is full of water so it's really heavy it mashes down into the ground and what we're doing is allowing for oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange down in the soil which will help promote micronutrients in the soil which will help promote soil growth and also when it rains on this farm we don't want water to run off the farm we want water to stay on the farm and that's what this does it provides little cavities for the water to get into we're gonna aerate three times a year for the next probably five to ten years we're gonna aerate aerate aerate and we're gonna see how this does and how it improves our land it's already doing great in the yard and great in the front pasture in front of our house we didn't have near the water runoff after we aerated now if you want advice on how to grow grass you can go with a keyboard cowboy that might be telling you that that aerator won't work how plugger works better a blahblah this is what we have it's a five foot aerator it's from tighten attachments there'll be a coupon code in the video description and this works it works we don't want to plug our fields we don't want to plug our pastures because there are just too many rocks out here and we'll rip a plugger to shreds but the spike aerator does a great job if it runs over a stump or a rock it just bleep goes right over top of it now if you want to talk to a guy that knows how to take a disaster of a pasture and turn it into something beautiful a beautiful hay field or a beautiful cow pasture right here it is no fertilizer on this field in the last two years nothing all we've done is mow mow Moe we actually cut hay off of it last year if you want to learn how to get grass to grow in your pastures listen to the guy that's growing grass and his pastures he'll teach you he'll show you later on in the year in September October we'll go back over this field with a seed drill a no-till drill will drill down fescue grass seed will also drill down some Timothy and will also drill down some Ladino clover and Ladino clover will fix nitrogen and keep us from having to fertilize this field forever rad for everybody that doesn't understand you cannot cut hay off of a piece of land for year after year after year after year without putting something back and the typical thing people put back is chemical fertilizer that is not what we want to do on our farm okay it's a story of my life we did not complete the entire job with the tractor here we got into a situation where the soil is starting to harden a little bit you can see storm clouds looming overhead it's summertime and the dirt dries out really really quickly so we will not be able to aerate the second half of this field and you'll see it as we're flying the drone over so I'm gonna hop on the ventrac and get busy contact I think you get it a busy day here on the farm a busy day with the tractor is just a busy busy day if it rains this evening which the cooming clouds are saying it may rain if it does rain this evening we'll get back over here with the aerator and we'll finish aerating the rest of this field you probably saw it all from the air so what we do is we cut and then I'll go back in and I'll air right behind then will aerate one more time before we drill down seed in september/october timeframe that's it just a normal day here so if it doesn't rain we'll get in the garden in the morning we'll work in the garden just a little bit a day in the life every day we try to make this place more beautiful and more sustainable and a better place pretty cool guys thanks a lot for joining me here on the Stoney Ridge farm today you asked me for a day in the life this is a day in the life wake up early get out fix a mower work on the tractor get on a tractor ride I probably have if it doesn't rain on me I'm just going to ride until I get this done I cut the field up into sections that take about four hours to mow and I just kind of know you know around about how much I can mow in about four hours it's about five acres so we'll cut it into sections mow it up get it done thanks a lot we'll see you next time please pound that like button subscribe the channel and see you on the Stoney Ridge again alright [Music] one final thought I was sitting here on the mower and a big old black snake crawled and went right up in that hay cutter that's a nice big black snake we like black snakes on the farm keep some mice down and the copperheads they say black snakes are around though Beano copperheads