Educational Moment: Pond Dam Maintenance

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