7,000,000+ Gallons-Per-Day Farm Drainage Project

everyone it's finally dry enough for us to embark on a financial journey here on our farm and a physical journey for dean drainage to install 24 inch diameter pipe dual wall over 1800 foot gonna be a long lay a lot of dirt will need to be moved and when it's all said and done there's going to be a lot less water on one of our farms hopefully [Music] [Music] [Music] although nearly the entire project will be dug by the wheel trencher they do have to have a starting place to put that wheel on the ground and the boot behind it so they dig it out with the track hoe this is arguably one of the most important spots of the project because you do lay from bottom to top that being because grade is incredibly important on a project that is purely driven by gravity water has to go from high to low and if you start at the high place and come down to the low and realize you're too far into the ground you can't really go back and undo all the pipelines so you start at the bottom work your way to the top they're hooking up the 24 inch boot onto their wheel trencher right now which i believe is the biggest diameter of pipe that they can lay with that machine any bigger it would have to be laid with a track hoe more expensive a lot longer process and not quite as accurate although they can do a pretty good job 24 is really the most cost efficient way to drain your farm and this is a very large project it doesn't look like they had to worry about the boot cart going anywhere lot was parked here seeing as that tire is about as flat as they come [Applause] [Music] in drainage crews getting a few last minute things lined up and they're going to hit the ground running i'm very excited to see this wheel trencher in action something about earth moving really just gets me going 1800 foot of trenching to go [Music] already have some good news and some bad news we'll start with the good it's almost 65 degrees and it's only 11 o'clock so we're looking at 70 degrees plus today that's gonna dry this ground out even more and get us closer and closer to maybe some field working condition at least for an hour or so and it's gonna rain probably and then the cycle will continue bad news the trencher cut an entire 10 foot and then hit a water line which obviously is not ideal everything had been located the water line was the only thing close in the area and the locators and the water company wasn't entirely sure where the line was even at so it's kind of a gamble they thought they were past it when they started obviously they weren't and now there's quite a bit of water running out into the trench i guess we now know that a little bit of pvc is no match for a steel wheel trencher do it a guest piece in my water seawater should be out sometimes shutting off their valves which will shut off the water [Music] the water company in question whose line was hit is here they're going to start fixing it i'm interested to see what exactly they'll do when i said this was a two to three day project this is where the three part comes in because you never know when a water main is going to sneak up on you dean drainage does excellent work they did their due diligence they probed it out they didn't find this line had it been something more important like a gas line and a hydrous line electrical line they would have certainly hand dug it and found it before they did anything although i don't know of a single gas company that would have let you just explore to find their line they would know exactly where it is so we're gonna watch him fix this take this out yeah [Music] water lines replaced pressurized and it looks to be working fine what they're going to do to work around is it actually has a pretty steep incline going towards this drainage ditch to go under so they're just going to move the entire tile over a little bit and we shouldn't have to mess with the grade too much just hope we don't hit it again because they had to dig such a large hole to fix that water line now they begin the process of back filling making sure that it's solid underneath that line so they don't crush it when they drive over it even with the loose dirt on top and also scooting the whole job a little bit to the north so they can hit the lower side of that line hopefully go right over the top of it if anything they bump the entire project up a couple of inches which makes a pretty large difference on something of this distance great is very important that being said they are going to have to do a lot of that digging to start now with a track hoe and a laser because they can't get their trencher back in there to really get a good grade so they're going to do that fill it in get the trencher back in we'll get started hopefully today or tomorrow or when it starts raining probably be ready to go then [Music] [Applause] [Music] well [Music] [Music] after they finish up a little bit of backfilling the dean drainage crew is going to quit for the evening they'll just leave the machine sitting here in the trench that way in the morning they could fire it up and hit the ground running much like we will be here in a couple weeks they're a little bit rusty unfortunately they really did not get to lay that much tile this off season fall winter and early spring or late winter where we're at right now just has not been too productive this is the first opportunity they've had to lay this tile the machine's been sitting here for two months now while they wait for it to dry up or not freeze like it was for a while there's definitely a little bit of rust maybe a few hiccups along the way but that can be expected after you run for the first time after sitting for months they're gonna hit it hard tomorrow pretty excited because they really got going here the last few hours and they were moving pretty significantly i'd say they're 15 or 20 percent done with delay that i go all the way across this hill and then we gotta cross the road tomorrow and hopefully it is just a two-day project it is bright and early on this beautiful thursday morning and after letting the machine warm up for a little bit the dean drainage crew has finally started moving some dirt i believe they will get a lot done today got all the kinks worked out yesterday and i'm excited to see how far we go we got about 15 or 1600 foot more to go let's talk a little bit more about the physical dimensions and specifications of this project like i said earlier in the video this is a 24 inch tile being ran about 1800 foot maybe a little more maybe a little less depending on how it comes out this tile is being laid at five one hundredths of a percent of grade meaning that it only has a marginal amount of slope from high to low in the grand scheme of things that's not very much slope to work with from high to low but being that it is a 24 inch diameter tile it will move a tremendous amount of water with an incredible amount of pressure pushing it through if it was a smaller tile let's say a 4 or 8 or even a 12 maybe we'd want a little bit more grade to make sure that doesn't silt over and the water flows fine however this is a very big project big pipe that water is going to keep it clean that is one of the two most important parts of laying tile grade is most important secondly is dirt coverage because you don't want your equipment running over the newly laid tile and damaging it especially when it's muddy out i guess maybe there's a third honorable mention for things to consider and that is a gracious land owner and tenants paul bill and stan who will let us run through their farm to drain our farm that really does not help them at all this is going to make a tremendous impact on our bottom line on the field and fields that it drains for them probably not going to do much but they're not going to incur any costs and we're getting it done before the crops in so hopefully everyone's fine with the project and don't do any more damage that is where they are right now with the tile plow they have to come across this hillside follow the low and they will end up where that red flag is looks like a lot on camera it's not quite as much to walk but when you're laying 24 inch tile that's a long distance to go because you have to create a pretty big trench and to cut through this hillside they're gonna have to get that thing deep in the ground they won't have to remove any overburden one that's hard to do costs a lot of money and time and two let me bring up pull those around and start peeling off the topsoil you're going to cause some permanent damage to the soil we don't have to do that if that was something that had to be done we probably would have just not done this project after cutting its way all the way across here the trencher will have to come across the road i believe they'll cut it out maybe track off a little bit of overburden that way they can just cut right through here and that will be the final resting place of the tile we'll have a surface inlet and none of the subsurface drainage out here that already exists is going to be hooked into this to put some really hard numbers on this for you guys a 24 inch tile at the grade they're laying it at is capable of draining about 2500 gallons per minute if you scale that number out to a 24 hour period that's just a little bit over three and a half million gallons of water now that's a substantial amount of water but we've actually already got a twin 24 inch concrete tile laid probably 20 to 30 years ago doing the same job now it does have some subsurface laterals out here in the field doing drainage but also a surface inlet this is going to nearly double our drainage capacity to get the water off of what has been nicely named lake dole this is the pre-existing tile system we've got all of our subsurface tiles feeding into this giant box that 24 inch tile right there runs the same exact length basically parallels what's going in now drains all this out and this entire surface area is for surface drainage pretty intuitive to look at the economics of this project it isn't cheap we're looking at probably fifty thousand dollars all in once they lay the tile put the inlet cut the road up do all that jazz quite a bit of money to put down but when you consider our crop loss and time spent fixing replanting this field and what we lose come harvest time it should pay for itself within a reasonable time frame now i'm not saying it's going to be a grand slam every year some years it may be marginal but we typically lose 30 acres out there if you take 30 acres of beans you take 30 bushel maker loss let's say that's 900 bushels of beans 900 at 15 dollars is about thirteen thousand fourteen thousand dollars if you get four good years of that you've paid for the project i can almost guarantee you that most farmers will agree that tile drainage is one of the best investments you can make on your farm other than purchasing the farm itself they're all going to say that what good is high-tech genetics what good is great fertility if your crops are constantly bogged down by water whether it be surface or subsurface water issues hurting your crops hurting your yields and really impacting you on the financial side that being said it does not hurt that our farm ended up on the fortunate side of a global misfortune with the ukrainian crisis commodity prices at all-time highs as much as i hate to say we have some profits above what we normally would average we're going to reinvest it somewhere where we're going to see a quick return while we're on the topic of financials i want to take a quick moment to talk about this awesome new mobile business banking app i've been using called north one north one is business banking in the palm of your hands all from your phone forget the old school ways of banking brick and mortar waiting on lines dealing with people all the time you can control all this from the palm of your hand by making use of the convenient and user-friendly north one app you can skip all the hassles that you are used to in step into a whole new world of mobile banking with just a few simple clicks on the app you can manage your businesses finances send money easily deposit money adjust account balances create and send invoices and schedule upcoming transactions it's pretty challenging with all these great features to pick a favorite but for me the envelope option really blows away everything else i can set up percentages of incoming deposits to be set towards certain things as a self-employed person my taxes are not withheld i have it set up so 30 percent of all of my deposits get put in a separate envelope that way i don't go all willy-nilly and spend all the money i need to pay uncle sam the north one app also easily integrates with almost every major payment processor available i know that not all of you make use of all these online systems so for those of you who are still a tiny bit old school while adapting to new technologies there is this very convenient and stylish north one business debit card if my word isn't good enough why don't you take the word of 350 000 businesses in the united states that have already opened up an account with north one not only are all these features great if you open up an account and fund it with fifty dollars before april 17th north one is picking ten winners for five hundred dollars and one grand prize winner for five thousand if you're interested in making a change your business baking spicing things up a little bit follow the link down below to open up an account with north one and you will be entered for this prize guys girls everyone who's watching i've started using this it's made my life a lot easier on the personal and business side of things i have a few different ventures to keep track of this app has made it a lot easier follow the link check it out these nine foot sticks of 24 inch tile are actually relatively heavy one person can kind of finagle them around dean's crew is using a skid steer to string them out along the tile path they're throwing them in that tile boot because these are big pieces of tile they have bells on one end a female end and then a male in the other one slides into it as you noticed in the tile boot or that square box on the back that maintains the integrity of the trench they have a plunger every time they set a tile in they plunge it forward snap them together and move on we had talked about doing this project for a couple years and actually ended up doing ourselves a disservice by not pulling the trigger the winter before we really decided on doing this that whole freezing situation in texas and southern usa happened a lot of resin plants shut down and the price of drain tile where that's produced went up by about 30 percent so i would speculate that if we had done this a little bit earlier we would have saved probably fifteen thousand dollars now if we waited and waited eventually it'd probably come back down but things usually go faster than they go down they've come across a spot in the field that's a little bit of a soup hole they unhook the boot they're cleaning the front of the mud off of that that's packed in and they're gonna replace some parts on the wheel trencher that help grab in the mud as you can see when it was running this trencher digging upward puts an incredible amount of weight on these back tires once it gets in tube out of shape they start to have a hard time keeping a very precise grade across the field so they want to make sure everything's in tip-top shape they've made more progress in the first hour of today than they did in the entirety of yesterday oh he just wants these cutters that look what you did not least been on for for a while got the new cutter teeth on [Music] [Music] foreign they keep two guys up top feeding in the sticks of 24 inch tile because it's quite a bit of labor and we have jake on the back here he's standing on the tile to make sure it stays together as it comes out the boot but he's also keeping an eye on the connections as they plunge them together if there's anything wrong or the tile doesn't see right they want to stop the machine and get that where it needs to be this would be a great time for me to mention don't forget to head over to farmfocus.com check out the channel merchandise support me or any of the other great creators that make all sorts of awesome agriculture content put the link right here as the trencher starts to approach this winding hillside they have to be very cognizant of their location they don't want to get too close to the pre-existing concrete tile and damage it that they're trying to straddle but they also don't want to get too far up the hill because this trencher is only capable of going so deep and once it gets past that point it will either not be able to maintain grade or they'll have to come out here and take off some overburden which they're not planning on doing and we're not planning on paying them to do so they have to keep an eye on that turn i believe they can probably get six to seven foot maybe eight with this trencher you do have to consider though that this tile is two foot of that depth so we wanna have good coverage and also keep our grade it's important wheel trenchers like they're running right now are typically reserved for putting in tile mains or very large tiles they have different sets of boots one for very large things like a 24 is the biggest they'll go they also do 20 ones with it then they have one they'll do 18 to maybe 14 and they'll have a smaller boot but once they get to a certain size a lot of times they prefer to use their self-propelled track tile plow it doesn't leave a wide trench it comes in nice in the tile it's much more efficient but it can't lay tiles these big it might lay four inch laterals at a very quick speed you definitely can't put in this big of a line with a plow [Music] that's a substantial amount of dirt it's moving [Music] it sounds like it's working pretty hard is it working hard yeah [Music] 126 foot today yeah rather be slow and accurate than fast and sloppy i guess yeah does this have an rpm throttle or is it just yeah but it's got a quick idle so when i need to shut it down on this flip it object kicks it way down we run about 2000 rpm so when you're digging with this does that screen override all these yeah so it takes precedence so if you have it set to do something up there this stuff doesn't matter do you have to turn it on here so if i pretty much leave this like this right here is our grade yeah so that's all controlled here yeah but the mask i move back and forth with this so like you'll see up here in this turn i'll be running this quite a bit because that'll help me make the turn you like running this or the plow more wow you get more done you make more money yeah this motor here is about four and a quarter and that's all based on watching that i'm watching that shield back okay that shield ain't level when you started working for bill were you in the boot yeah the food ain't much fun maybe not today i would say it might be boring but it's going to be a nice day to be in the booth but i bet you when you're laying in the wheat stuff in the summer it's not fun [Music] it's a lot of length and money of drain tile they put in so far today about to hit that curve it gets a little more interesting because a straight shot is always easier than bending when you're working with nine to ten foot pieces of pipe and then making a curve and trying to keep everything together i'm sure i'll do just fine these guys are professionals if you're in the central illinois region looking for a good tile contractor give dean drainage a call the tile crew had to take about an hour break this one was kind of out of their control their trimble rtk gps system that they rely on to get that precision grade to lay the tile lost its signal courtesy of what they said was russian satellites i don't know if that's true or not but they can't they have to have that because they need those multiple points of coordinates and accuracy so that grade is perfect they called their rep immediately for trimble and he said they were the fifth or sixth person to call within the last five minutes so they're back up and running now that they're just going willy-nilly but i don't think they'd do that let's watch them lay some tile [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] ah [Music] because they're trying to cut around a hillside and turn at the same time they have to run the boot at an angle they're cutting almost a 30 inch trench and they have a 30 inch frame so that wheel with a little bit of play in it has found its way up against the side of the frame and is rubbing so they're trying to straighten it out a little bit i think they're going to ease off of the curve that way it doesn't hit it was hitting on the frame kind of thumping don't cause any kind of damage to the machine so [Applause] not only was the wheel a little bit topped from cutting at an angle a few of the wider cutter teeth were also loose so they tightened those down it seems to be running fine but look at the tilt this thing runs out to get across this hillside which isn't even really that much of a hillside the end is in sight but it's also a lot farther away than it looks it's actually been an extremely productive day here laying some tile on the south side of coles county dean's crews really hit the ground running after they got all those hiccups out of the way yesterday loading up the last couple hundred feet of pipe that should get us to the road i think i'll be our quitting point for the day because they're digging such a deep and wide trench here they would normally use this back filler right here to screw the dirt right back to the middle instead they're using the tracco it's just more efficient they will come back over it though and grind it up some more pile it up that way this will all settle and hopefully here another three or four weeks will at least be passable for a plankton that's one of the unfortunate parts about letting someone run through your ground in the spring which bill stan and paul have graciously done is that it's going to be very inconvenient so almost to the road say we got another 200 feet and all we got to do is cross it but in the inland we're done i doubt it'll get done tonight to collapse on the though as they go through that's a soil type difference or dryness difference for a while they had 500 foot of uncontested child now it's getting filled in the minute it goes over one of the nicer parts about using a wheel trencher to lay tile especially big mains is you can see the other tiles especially old clays that you cut through there's been numerous tiles along this path a lot of old ones that we've cut into we've been able to tell while the trench is open if the tile is still salvageable and needs hooked in or if it can just be forgotten about because a lot of these old clays have filled in with dirt that smaller old tile right there is a great example it is still flowing a little bit of water but it has probably two or three inches of silt in the bottom if it was a bigger tile or a newer tile we would definitely hook it in unfortunately as this starts to cave in quicker it gives us less time to really think about these things almost immediate at this point like clockwork i would say it's probably a soil type deal if a wider sandier soil maybe that doesn't have as much structure these upper side panels on their boot try to keep the dirt from falling in before the tile is out when they get into shallower areas they remove it because it's easier to put the big pipe in but not in another deep area in the cut so they're putting it back on as you can see the dirt is starting to kind of fall over the walls if it gets under the tile before it's set in the boot it'll mess up the grade you don't want to do that you want to make sure the tile's laid right so they're putting it back on but they're cutting through the hill they're really deep so they had the walls up and then after they got out they took it down to make their lives a little bit easier the walls caving in have presented another issue they're caving in before the boot gets passed and the weight of that is pushing the boot walls into each other and that 20 inch tile which is actually a larger diameter than 24 inch probably closer to 30 on the outside isn't fitting down into the boot so they can't attach it to the new tub it's always something about the same as our lives out on the farm you get one problem out of the way another one pops right up so i'd say we're only about 100 or 150 yards away from our final destination which is this red flag once you're this close you're almost done but i don't think they'll do that tonight sun's starting to set i don't know about you guys but i don't really think they want to tear up a road in the dark who knows what could go wrong with that although there are no utilities on this road which is very nice sometimes you got to work around pesky water mains electrical lines gas lines or other things but you don't really want to hit so we're fortunate there it's not really a busy road should be done before no time they moved a lot of dirt over the last two days more today than yesterday but kinks are always to be expected once we get a big rain there'll be no shortage of surface water to flow we have a surface stitch cut out from the center of this ponding field comes down cuts the corner the new one that's going to go here the 24 straddles is actually about 150 yards to the north there's a lot of moving parts [Music] foreign will the trencher go through the road oh yeah cut the asphalt out or anything i guess he's really like [Music] [Music] [Applause] they're doing some back filling got the backhoe and the filler running now we have all that pipe that was laid covered up they pulled out of the ground here tomorrow morning they're gonna cut through the road put an inlet in and they'll be done with this project hopefully just a very short amount of distance left to go [Music] [Applause] i wasn't suspecting to find the entirety of this process from start to finish to be so fascinating but it's really cool to watch these guys work i mean i'm a farmer by trade i take care of the ground raise crops harvest crops and everything in between but these guys dean drainage crew they're tile guys by trade i mean from january to december that's what they're doing they're laying tile year round they're not farming they specialize in this and they lay millions upon millions of feet of tile every year or at least they hope to depending on whether or not the weather cooperates i don't know if you guys watching this or anyone who watches this will really find it as intriguing as i do but it will be neat one day to look back 20 30 years later or even my kids 40 or 50 years later that see that tile on the ground and can go back and reference this video and say hey this is when the tile went in the ground that's draining our farm out here because we do have a 24 out here that's 30 years old or so and i have no idea what it was like when it was late it was a concrete tile so they have to set those in butt them up it's not quite as efficient in this process but i don't know at the very least maybe at least one or two or three people will find it enjoyable [Applause] [Music] [Music] this morning they're getting geared up to cut through this road what they want to do is have one solid piece of tile across the actual road because they don't want any joints underneath that's just the point of failure especially with continuous weight and travel across it so they're going to run those shorter sections all the way up to the end here they're going to cut it off put a coupler on it run a big 20-foot stick another coupler go across the road and they're pretty much home free because that's where the inlet's going to be not much left to go but this is going to be another very labor-intensive part of the process obviously they got to cut a little bit more be very vigilant about the road it's just rock and roll so i think they'll go right through it of course to persuade the people that travel this road which is not very many they got it blocked off i would think that if they saw a big open trench across the middle they wouldn't drive across it but unfortunately i don't really have that much faith in humanity [Music] [Music] now they've reached the end of the dig but the food is so heavy that they're having a hard time lifting it out of the ground so they may have to detach it grab a track hoe unhook it pull it out of the ground do it separately thank you thank you over there [Applause] they're in the process of unhooking that boot and as they're doing so here comes the heavy rain i don't know if they'll finish buttoning up this tile and hooking in these two smaller tiles but they got the bulk of the work done and that's really the most important we can cover this tile up and really fix it ourselves at any point from here on out the inlet's not the hardest part of the work the 1800 foot of 24 inch dual wall they ran that's the challenge and they're done with the exception of unhooking the boot which looks like a pretty interesting process right now the race is on to get this all buttoned up it's a pretty decent rain we got coming down shut the door in the trackout for him [Music] it doesn't really take a rocket scientist to understand that this is not great dirt working weather starting to get kind of sloppy on top the dean drainage crew is really just cleaning everything up making sure that road is tampering down that way it's crossable here pretty shortly and they're going to go back in refill the entire trench line make sure that's settled up so over the next couple weeks it will fill back in easily that being said they got the hardest part of the project and arguably the second most important part done today that is crossing the road filling it back in the other only hard part is obviously starting right there at the outlet then of course hitting a water line that's hard to prepare for but they did a great job i think they're glad to be done because i doubt that laying this kind of tile for how much time and effort and labor it takes is really the most profitable it was up to them i'm sure they'd rather be out here with their track tile plow laying a couple hundred thousand feet of four inch laterals but we needed this done they got to it as soon as they could and hopefully or not hopefully we get a big rain but if we do i want to see what this tile is capable of because it's ready to run we need to form some kind of an inlet and that's it but we may not do that today with the rain moving in and the ground getting kind of sloppy they're not going to be able to hook in that short run of tile they're still going to work on getting this boot off but for the most part these machines are going to rest after a few days of hard work when it dries up they're going to come back hook a couple tiles in very short runs fix a few tile holes fill some rocking in some spots but this project is almost entirely done everything else is just a gravy on top back where they started the lay over here on the drainage ditch they're picking up the extra 24 inch tile that they had he'd rather have it not need it than he did not have it especially given the supply chain issues we have in the country right now they didn't have enough 24 they may not have been able to complete this project so they had maybe 150 extra foot they'll be able to take that home and use it on a different project in the future the new tile on the south here has a tiny bit of water trickling out the bottom i assume from some other tiles weeping into the perforations and making its way out the one to the north which is the older 24 inch tile has all those laterals hooked on to it so that is subsurface drainage running right now that is ground water from the pore space in our soil making its way into subsurface forage drain tiles connecting into that concrete box and heading out that really shows you the benefit of the laterals this right here may have something hooked into it at the future but for now it is just a surface drain capable of moving a tremendous amount of water i accurately stated earlier in the video 3.6 million gallons of water per 24 hours that's already a lot then you pair it with another 24 inch tile you're looking at over 7 million gallons per day of drainage capacity i'd say that our pawning issues are going to be less not completely alleviated but definitely not as much of a problem as they've been in the past mother nature does seem to have a very cruel sense of humor so i wouldn't be surprised if it didn't just stop raining for the rest of the year and we don't have a 2012 esque drought where our crops are just burning up in the fields i don't think that's going to happen i'm always optimistic that we're going to have high yields this folks though was the start to finish of dean drainage here in mattoon an excellent tile crew putting in 1700 1800 foot of dual wall 24 inch tile at a 5-100 grade i'll check back in the future in another video stay tuned subscribe so you can see if we get a big rain what this tile is capable of as always everyone i really appreciate you tuning in make sure you head over to farmfocus.com if you're interested and get yourself some channel merchandise maybe tag me on instagram or facebook i might shout some of you out because i am very very appreciative of you guys and all that you do to help keep this show running i think this was pretty awesome i hope you guys find it as interesting as i have that's definitely more than enough farming for one video like the video if you enjoyed it subscribe if you want to see more and comment down below if you have any questions you know i love to talk about farming have a great day everyone peace [Music] you

Channel: aTrippyFarmer

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Keywords: farming, farm life, farm vlog, farmer, combine, agriculture, corn, tractor, illinois, seed, drones, a trippy farmer, atrippyfarmer, vlog, john deere, farm, farming videos, tractor stuck, cole the cornstar, millennial farmer, welker farms, equipment, tractors, harvest, tillage, farms, spring, farming simulator 19, soybean, usa farming, fs19, horsepower, new tractor, crash course, technology, farming simulator, limestone, s780, dozer, crawler, fertilizer, nh3, tornado, damage, destruction, caught on camera

Id: jtigepmiEkQ

Length: 50min 53sec (3053 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2022