23 – Bringing the Big Guns to the Farm

Once we had the areas cleared and we had saved up enough money, it was time to bring the big guns in. A friend introduced me to a guy that owns a BIG dirt works company. He drove up to check out what we were doing and wanted to be a part of it right away. He made me a deal I couldn’t refuse in exchange for help setting his well pump and doing his solar for it after seeing what we had done.

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Transport on an 80,000-pound machine is expensive. There’s no way around it. To justify the cost, we came up with three projects to spread it out on. House pad, barn/shop pad and the pond. A few days later this showed up at the bottom of our hill.

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A D8 moves so much material in a short amount of time, I was on the run with the fire hose trying to keep moisture in it pretty much the whole time it was running. There rarely was any opportunity for pictures of the process itself. Here’s the best I have of pad #1.

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The finished rough pad. At this point we would just let it sit until we could afford to bring in water trucks and a blade for finish grading.

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Pad 2. If you have never watched a big dozer rip solid rock before, put it on your to do list. Deliciously violent. We finished it as best we could with the backhoe so we could use this area to process the woodchips and compost. We still need to finish grade this pad.

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