Turning Reclaimed Mine Sites into Farm Fields

the sounds of heavy equipment moving earth is not that unusual in the southern coal fields of West Virginia but on a mountaintop in Mingo County there's a new sound in a new machine that's turning reclaim mine sites into farm fields the DEP is Mike huff has the details this is no ordinary piece of farm equipment welcome aboard the second super soil stone crusher that's Nathan Hall president of reclaim Appalachia at the controls of all this noise and vibration and what he's doing is turning this into this the first a little background there are hundreds of thousands of acres of land throughout Central Appalachia in West Virginia Virginia and Kentucky that have been surface mined and reclaimed over the past 30 to 40 years and really only a small fraction of that is in what I would consider a active production of any type really especially in terms of you know really productive agriculture and so it's been my mission for the past several years to find out what is the most effective and cost-effective way to take these many times very large landscapes and convert them into much more farmable lands reclaimed surface mines tend to have very compacted and rocky soils with a lot of large stones close to the surface not ideal for large-scale agriculture so if you were to try to go back to it with any type of typical tillage equipment like a roto tiller or a disc or a chisel plow you'll either break that equipment very quickly or just won't even go in the ground at all into the stone crusher it was built to take on the rocky soils of Europe and can pulverize rocks up to 16 to 20 inches in diameter it's made by an Italian company but if you're expecting Ferrari or Lamborghini speed Boston or two but a monitor the ground conditions we respond to them in time I've always got to try to maintain as much working depth as possible without bogging the Machine down as you can see this is very uneven terrain after we run the river across before the stone pressure does its thing crews use a ripper attachment to break up the soil and bring the larger rocks to the surface the ones that are too big for the stone crusher are shoved into Windrose or broken up into more manageable sizes with an excavator and a jackhammer attachment and then it's time to fire up the stone crusher and help speed up the geologic time scale 500,000 year process and do it in about five minutes you think about it's really the same that's just breaking down rocks from brain and natural processes which is how soil is made in the first place we're just doing all that mechanically very quickly this is the second trip to coalfield Development Corporation's agroforestry test site at 22 mine Road and Oh County the group used the stone crusher last November to condition a small test plot about a fifth of an acre that was planted this spring with a variety of crops cut flowers vegetables and berries as proof of concept that land prepped like this could support a variety of plants they also planted some cover crops that will be plowed back under to help introduce organic matter back into the soil immediately after using a stone crusher we're planting that into a mix of buckwheat and soybeans sorghum Sudan grass and then will till that in and then will replant in mid to late September with a mix of wheat and Austrian winter peas and vetch and things of that nature so by doing that continuous cycling of cover crops as well as bringing in some organic matter I think you know we can really quickly have soils that rival your high quality bottom line soils there's even potential options for braising livestock but the primary focus is high-value crops if you go to any existing reclaim mine site you see black berries galore and also wild raspberries so to me that shows that these plants already do really well these are natural pioneers commercial blackberry and raspberry farming is quite profitable so I think that's one of the really suitable types of you know high-value crop production at or the bramble fruits also grapes really like stony kind of semi arid conditions so I think viticulture is definitely a possibility in these lands you know lavender is kind of a Mediterranean plant that that likes raki kind of well-drained soils this summers demonstration condition about 15 acres in about a hundred hours of stone crusher rations so the process does seem to be scalable to larger plots of land as we're entering this phase of of understanding that you know we are going to keep having coal mining in this region but it may not ever be quite at the level that it had been previously and and also as we keep realizing that you know many of these reclaimed Maya sites aren't very likely to be turned into a Walmart or a hospital or a golf course and whatnot I think we're at a really good point in time to start thinking creatively about you know what really works on these sides you know what is really scalable and so that's that's really been my motivation is figuring out you know a what works physically on the landscape you know what what do we know that we can actually do for a physical standpoint then also what is going to be economically viable into the future in Mingo County I'm Mike huff for environment matters this summer's demonstration has generated interests from several parties looking to lease time with the machine they say plans to purchase the super soil stone crusher are currently under way

Channel: Environment Matters

Views: 28,610

Rating: 4.7824268 out of 5

Keywords: west virginia, environment, environment matters, surface mining, coal, coal mining, agriculture, farming, seppi, reclaim appalachia, coalfield development

Id: j_OBZKl956g

Length: 6min 30sec (390 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 12 2018