Something broke loose with the skid steer..farm pond tips for everyone!!

hey there folks this is josh stoney ridge farmer welcome back to the farm we're on part two of the big clearing job that we had to do and we've got skitty bop here with the front mount mower deck on it so yesterday we were out working with the ventrac tractor a piece of wood got hung up in there and broke a pulley so we had to move on to a little bit bigger equipment so today what we're going to be doing is poking our way through we're out here on a pond dam you can see here's the pond and here's the dam and we're going to be poking our way through these pines so come along today as we try our best to remove all these pine trees from this pond dam right here clear this area out we'll get you some cool drone footage hopefully skinny bop it's a little bit wet right now so hopefully skitty bop can make its way up and down through here if not we'll get all we can get and that's as good as we can do so we'll have to get in with chainsaws and stuff like that there's a few trees like this guy here that are just way too big so come along let's have some fun clearing out some brushy spots on the backside of a pond down all right 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 afraid of life times like this if you mess with my freedom i'll tell you just what you can kiss all right folks if this is your first time to the stoney ridge farm channel welcome to the channel we have an ongoing farm project on our property and a subscriber reached out to me and he had some huge mess going on here so we're going to take a little skitty bop and we're going to start working on clearing out around his pond dam here so it's a little bit steep and you can see some of these saplings are probably about big as your wrist a few of them down there are about big as your legs so we probably won't be able to tackle those with the little skitty bop but what we have here is our john deere 250 skid steer you'll see my camera gear and stuff piled on here the drone all that stuff this is an ambusher brand um brush cutter and skiddy bop here is a little john deere 250. it's about a 60 something horsepower john deere skid steer we've had a little issue with some fluid some hydraulic fluid leaking underneath it i think i may have overfilled the hydraulic reservoir on this thing so we're going to get busy we'll get to work hopefully we'll make quick work of this and have some fun today so this is what you really want to do with your pond dam you don't want trees and brush and stuff like that growing on your pond because what that does when they die or when they rot that provides an opportunity for your pond dam to start leaking so you don't want this you got to maintain the back side of your pond and the front side of your pond let's get busy [Music] well after about 10 minutes of attempting this skitty bop doesn't have the power to push that uh that brush hog it just doesn't have the power to push the brush cutter um so i guess this video is going to kind of be a little bit of an educational video instead of a video about getting busy with skitty bop let me show you what skitty bop did um so our plan was to go through here and take out some of these bigger trees now this brush hog is big enough to do that i tossed the drone up in the air got you a little before shot that's what a pond dam should not look like okay so your pond dam should not look like this right here and that little preliminary shot basically shows it what's going to have to be done is you're going to have to get in here either with a forestry mulcher or a bigger skid steer than what i have to cut all this brush out of here it just it just won't do it i planned on getting in here with the ventrac but the ventrac will only cut stuff about that big about two and a half inches so let this be a little educational video so this pond right here i'm to say is 30 or 40 years old if you have a pond and you start getting growth on it like this right here now we were with joel salatin up at polyface farm gosh i guess it was about two months ago and you saw joel going in and cutting out a sycamore a little sycamore tree like that and he basically educated all of us and that's what i'm gonna do with you guys do not let your pond damn get like this i really really wanted to put some equipment to work with you guys today but uh it doesn't look like that's gonna happen so if you've got a pond and you've got root structure in your pond uh in your pond dam then what that does is once the tree dies it leaves a hole it leaves a place for water to go and or when you have pond structure like this when you have structure on your dam like like these little saplings what will happen is um muskrats and other critters will get down in here and undermine your pond dam and eventually they'll work their way across and if you look so you can see right here the pond dam's out it's kind of like a belly if you go back in that corner right there it's it's not like a belly so it's already undermined itself just a little bit right here and it's a bad thing to have unfortunately i'm gonna have to tell this guy that there's just no way i can get in here and do this unless we rent probably a forestry mulcher it's it's just too big the stuff is too big it's just too much um i overestimated what skitty bop could do but hopefully this is a good educational moment for you guys do not do not do not let trees this size grow up on your pond dam because it will absolutely destroy it and it seems counterintuitive it seems like that root structure would hold the pond dam together but it doesn't it causes holes in the pond dam so if you're building a pond or if you have a farm pond on your place get out there and get that brush off of it this fall and that way you don't have any problems and keep it mowed if you can't keep it mowed go down with the weed eater about twice a year and just buzz it that's what you got to do that's pond upkeep guys so let this be your lesson in pond dam upkeep today thanks a lot for joining me here on the stoney ridge farm today kind of a disappointment but that's the way it goes sometimes we gotta load back up get the unicorn dodge back up and get back to the house thanks a lot guys pound the like button jump in subscribe the channel i'd love to have you back