She's Tired of picking up rocks! So we put this little tractor to work!

hey there folks this is Josh Stoney Ridge farmer welcome back to the farm it is a beautiful day here in March here on the Stoney Ridge farm and today we're gonna be breaking out the honey badger for the first time so the honey badger better known as the ventrac tractor we're going to be using the landscape rake on the front of the ventrac and the landscape rake on the rear that's Ricky Bobby so we're gonna go we're gonna be raking up some rocks on a ridge that we cleaned off last fall so come along today as we show you this little machine at work we'll talk a little bit about the farm and a little bit about what we're doing here on the Stoney Ridge today all right whoa ain't afraid of [Music] that's my freedom on tape as well as you can choose okay guys if this is your first time to the Stoney Ridge farm channel please jump in subscribe to the channel pound that like button while you're in here this is our ventrac tractor this is a 24 point 8 horsepower Kubota diesel ventrac tractor they're built in America made in America 100% in Orrville Ohio so pretty cool little tractor first thing we got to do is fix a tire that went down and it was constantly going down it came off the rim I took it up to the tire store they put a slimed tube in it so hopefully we won't have any more problems this is the landscape rake on the front of the ventrac and this is Ricky Bobby the landscape brake on the rear of the ventrac so we're going to be dueling rakes here dueling landscape rakes today we have an area probably about I don't say 1/2 acre maybe 3/4 of an acre up on the top side of our farm here that we just cleaned off you're gonna see a lot of rocks here there are a ton of rocks in this area it's a hedgerow where for I guess the last several hundred years the farmers attended this property piled up all the rocks well we came in and disturbed that pile and opened up a time bomb basically of rocks so what we're planning on doing is getting up here with Reiki bobby and reiki bobby is good for loosening everything up and then the rake on the front of the honey badger or the ventrac there the rake on the front of that is good for pushing up piles and after we get done we'll take the skid loader and we'll go scoop up all those rocks and we'll dump them off in the woods and a place that we know won't be pasture anymore just so you guys know if you haven't been to the farm what we have here on this farm is around 200 acres and everything you see here I'm gonna walk over here real quick everything you see here was not here five years ago so we put the shopman we put the driveway in these are our baby birds and our mobile chicken tractor right here and our cows are over there all of this was forested and we're taking it back to pasture and we're a first generation farm so let's get busy we're gonna crank up the ventrac raise up the rake in the front and put that wheel and tire back on [Music] okay here's the wheel and tire assembly and basically we just put another tube in there this wheel entire assembly comes out it has bushing I guess in there that it spins upon and this is a greasable setup so what we'll do we'll slide our bushing inside the wheel here kind of show you guys what I'm doing slide that bushing inside the wheel that's our grease fitting right there right here and this front piece right here on the ventrac this these wheels are set up to make sure that you level land so you can rake debris off the land this is hard to do and talk at the same time there we go so you can rake debris off the land and you can level land or gravel so this is an awesome little driveway maintenance machine we leased the ventrac tractor last year and we decided to go on and buy the tractor after our lease was up this year so we've had the tractor for somewhere in the neighborhood of a year and we own it now if that's not a testament to how awesome these little tractors are I don't know what is we mowed 85 acres of pasture with this machine somewhere in a neighborhood of five to seven times last year so five to seven times we mowed our pastures with this machine with the rough cut deck we have this landscape break we have a rough cut deck we have a finished cut deck with a striper on it and we also have a stump grinder for this machine and you'll see more of that as the videos progressed throughout the year this year let's hop on get busy we're going to ride up here you're going to get some cool drone footage and all kinds of stuff we'll take you up kind of show you the debris field real quick [Music] here we are on the rock ridge so I'll post a link at the end of this video to when I clean this off with the excavator and then we had my loader crew come in behind us and you can see where the grass is brown versus where its light brown or green this is the area with all the dirt and rocks and debris got pushed all the way down into the woods over here so down off over the hill what my goal is is to get all these rocks up so here's an example all throughout here this land is covered with rocks we can pick them up by hand but man what a chore so the goal with the ventrac is to pull the rocks into a windrow so I'm trying to pull the rocks all the way up into a win we're right here with a window right here kind of hard to say so the landscape break on the back is angled this one will also be angled and when we get done we'll take the rock piles and push them up with this thing it's like a mini bulldozer basically as we start working all these rocks up you can see lots of rocks lots of stuff to clean up we're gonna toss the drone up in the air you'll get an interesting aerial perspective and you'll really be able to see where we pushed off over down the hill I'm gonna program the drone to kind of follow me as I go hopefully fingers crossed we don't get into some trees [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] alright guys you can see right there the sun's going down on Appalachia and I got my best good helper here with me with big smiles on all the way up here did you park this right here yeah so guys you can see we've taken all the rocks and debris and there's still a few rocks out here we'll have to handpick some of these well we're gonna go back and forth with the rake it's probably gonna take me another 4 hours tomorrow I've been out here for about three hours now but you can see it went from the surface of the Moon all rough and rocky to smooth and nice and you can see one of the piles I pulled it up here on top of this pile just to park and stuff what we'll do after this is we'll come in and we'll spread some seed so this little landscape rake and little Reiki Bobby on the back there makes an awesome seed bed so I'll come up here and I'll spread some grass seed down some fescue and some annual rye grass and a little bit of millet millet takes better in the dry time of year it's the wet time of year now but it's going to be in the dry time probably June July so when you're spreading seed in the springtime or the summer time you need to put down something that is heat and drought tolerant if we put the millet down the millet will take and it will shade the fescue the perennial grass and the perennial grass will take back over cool awesome stuff guys so it did a great job SuperDuper happy still got a lot more work to do but look at that awesome just groomed out beautiful guys want to thank you a whole lot for joining me here on the Stoney Ridge farm channel hope you enjoyed some of this footage enjoyed the music in the fellowship we'll see you guys next time on the Stoney Ridge all right [Music] Pierce we had some way supposed to be Stone Tyrion Oh