STUCK in the POND! Farming....One of THOSE DAYS!

Ventrac is spinning all eight tires. All eight tires are spinning and I'm hung up. Folks, today on the Stony Ridge Farm Channel, we're going to show you how to get the Ventrac stuck in the mud. I ran off in a hole over here. The pond is beautiful. It's coming back to life. But I boo-booed and also hit a yellow jackets nest over there. Thank goodness I didn't get stung. [Music] Good morning everybody. Welcome back to the Stony Ridge Farm. Today we're going to update you on the pond repair. So if you guys missed that video, there'll be a link at the end of this video. We have a leak in our pond pipe right here and it's caused a lot of despair. So probably about a week ago, um the pond level was down 2 ft lower than it is right now. You can see how much that pipe's sticking out of the ground or out of the water. It was like this high out of the water. So what I meant to do was uh take my Ventrac tractor and mow um around the pond banks. And what this little machine does, if you guys have never seen one of these, it it's just amazing. You can see the drop off of the pond dam. If you've got ponds or you got steep areas on your property, the Ventrac is the only go-to tool. I mowed right off the edge right here and this is steep. There's it's 20 ft down right there. It just drops off. This is a pond dam. Uh mowed all of that and my goal was, while the water was low here, to take the skid steer and push all the debris back into the pond here. There were some rocks and stuff on the edge so that I can mow. Well, we got 5 and 1/2 in of rain in the last 2 days and the water level has really come up. So uh let me show you what we did here. A lot of uh thinking went into this, but mainly my pond dam had uh washed out pretty bad uh right here. I'll show you. So you can see we poured concrete. I built a little dam right here and I dammed it up and I poured concrete in. Underneath this concrete, which is uh 9,000 plus pounds of concrete, underneath there is the pipe uh that was leaking. Will it leak again? That is the question. So we plugged it. Uh we plugged it up at the top and we poured concrete to block it. Fingers crossed that that holds. I honestly don't know that it's going to hold. That is a 10,000-lb chunk of concrete. It's going to leak slowly over time. That's what I think. Will it be a solution that'll last me the rest of my life? I don't know. I I don't know. But so far so good. It's working fantastic. The pond level has come way way up and today we're going to hop on the Ventrac and I'm going to mow these embankments all along the edge of the pond. So you guys will get a cool view, a little time lapse of this. Again, I tried to get out here in time to get all the way down into the water, but I couldn't. And we may run into a rainstorm. We've got rain clouds above us. There's a hurricane evidently or tropical storm out to sea in North Carolina here and it's coming in today. Uh part of the rain from that's coming in today. So got to get down and boogie. First thing we'll do, take up this old fence line. We're going to start on one end and work our way all the way across. I do remember uh setting some traps uh here that have cables hooked to them. Now if I get hung up in a cable, you guys will be the first to know. We've got a muskrat problem. You can see right there is a muskrat hole. Um muskrats have been burrowing into the pond dam. They're not good for the pond. This is the new pipe that I put in about 6 or 7 years ago because I knew I was going to have this problem at some point. Thank goodness I did that. We dug all this out several years ago and that was back before I guess it was back before I was making YouTube videos. Yeah. Way back. So let's pull up my gosh, these stinking muskrats that they've damaged the dam all the way out to here. Um we're going to go ahead and pull all this fencing up. There's some wire that goes right here. We're going to pull it up, get it out of the way and then just go back and forth and back and forth. Oh, the kayak's got 5 in in it, too. Here we go, dummy. Here we go. There you go, buddy. I wondered how long it would be before I hit a yellow jackets nest and I got into one right there. Thank goodness I didn't get lit up by those guys. Yeah, that's a mess. I'll have to come back over here tonight get rid of those. We won't get it all done today, but halfway down this side. Cross your fingers I don't hit any more yellow jackets. [Music] [Applause] Folks, I hope you're enjoying the video today. Please hit that like button, subscribe to the channel. I'd love to have you back. What you can't see here is that this is really working my right arm hard. Pulling the lever on the right side of the Ventrac, which is what makes it makes it go forward and backwards, is challenging on hills like this. You got to pull the a little bit harder to go up and down hills. And if not for this Ventrac, I don't know what I would do. Uh you cannot back a farm tractor back in a spot like this. It is just absolutely unsafe and way too steep. I could not get down to the edge of the water like this with any other tractor. [Music] [Applause] [Music] >> Well, every day don't go just the way we planned. Um I ran off over in where the muskrats have been chewing up the ground right here. You can see there's a spot right here. I've got to come back in with loads of dirt and fix this stinking mess, but I'm stuck. Um the ground is wet right here and the Ventrac is spinning all eight tires. All eight tires are spinning and I'm hung up. So, I got to walk ahead of me. I got to go and get the tractor and we got to tie off to the hitch on the rear here and pull this thing out. So, let me go get the tractor. Didn't want to walk 5 miles today, but uh it's like the tractor had other plans. Not planned. Not fun. Uh I didn't want this to happen. I got a nice walk and we're really racing the rain. It started sprinkling on me just a little bit ago, but um yeah, let's ride on back and I need to mow this, too. Uh this is the other pond. I built this pond for about 2,500 bucks. This was just kind of a wet spot on the farm. We dug it out, dammed it up. Now we got good irrigation for the cows. Let's go get the tractor. Should we try with a hay spear? Uh I'm going to take it off. All right, let's see if we can break something else. Nice little walk through the ticks. It's like super happy about that. SUPER STOKED. THERE WE GO. [Music] [Applause] [Music] This is why I have a shirt down there at the merch store that says stupid hurt. I knew better than to get over in there. [Music] Did it anyway. [Music] There's not a lot of room right here for me to do what I need to do. So, I got to get pretty close. [Music] I only brought straps, but looks like the Ventrac has drifted down the hill a little bit already. This is going to be interesting. I need two people to do this. It's just me. Bro, what's going on? Put her in the low. Try, baby. There we go. [Applause] One of them days. Just one of those days. When you don't want to wake up. Come on, bud. Woo! I got it. [Applause] Got it, buddy. I got it. Woo! Well, we got it. Don't trust your emergency brake. I'm not going to trust the brake on this uh tractor right here for too long. It's It's a pretty steep hill. Guys, you cannot tell how steep hills are uh from the video footage. You just can't tell. Uh it's really steep. So, get this tractor on some flat ground and get back to mowing. Shut her down, Buford. She is sucking mud. Well, she was sucking mud a little bit there. Uh so, we got her done. All the way down that bank, all the way across the dam, all the way except for that little guy right there. Boop boop boop. That's where my yellow jacket nest is and all the way over there. I was really worried the whole time that we were going to get a downpour and I was going to get stuck over there where it was really, really steep. I've been putting this off for quite some time because the ground has been wet and I didn't want to get stuck just like I got stuck right there. The Ventrac is a beast, but it's not uh completely anti-getting-stuck proof. Uh the reason it got stuck is cuz there's a hump right here. So, the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 wheels and a hump right there. The hump had taken the weight off of the tires and that's why she was stuck. So, the Ventrac is pretty low to the ground. I'm going to say it's yeah, maybe 6, maybe 8 inches. I don't know how much ground clearance it has, but it's pretty low. You can get hung up on a rock or you can get hung up on a high spot like that if you're in a bind and I was in a bind. If you ever get a Ventrac or if you hire somebody that has a Ventrac to clean up your pond, just be aware of that. Also, know that the Ventrac is an articulating tractor, meaning that it rotates in the middle. Well, that means it'll crab walk with you. Crab walking means if it's on a steep grade or gradient like this or even on a hillside like you see over there, it will work its way down the hill slowly and steadily. If you go around a tree, it'll crab walk around that tree and you got to be careful. Don't get too darn close or you and the tree will be really close friends. You'll break the tree off or have to drag the um Ventrac just like I did off of the tree or off of the fence. Ask me how I know. We'll keep you guys updated on the pond. Everything looks great. Uh the water level is coming right on back up. We've got two more days of rain. I feel like we'll be back up to normal level within the next 48 hours and it's only been about a week since we did the repair. Keep you guys posted on that. So far, so good. If you haven't seen that video, there'll be a link at the end of this video and probably some stupid bloopers where I uh made some boo-boos. We try to do that in every video. Thank you guys. We'll see you next time on the Stony Ridge farm. All around us is a 150-acre first-generation farm project and I hope you'll join me here on this journey. See you. Woo! [Music] Totally forgot this camera's going. Dear dadgum dadgum bitter damn beaver is sucking mud. Well, she was sucking mud a little bit there. Yeah, also make good video. Put some excitement in here. Spot where I knew I shouldn't have been. Walk through the ticks. I super happy about that. Super stoked. Just one of those days when you don't want to wake up. Come on, bud. There you go. Get it stuck. You know what? Just for giggles, let's take the drone over and see if we can figure out where those yellow jackets are coming from. They do not like the drone. Hope you guys enjoyed the video today. See you next time. Woo! Hee hee.