My friend has 100 acre field of prairie dirt. It is generally flat (not necessarily smooth). When wet, it is never bad enough that a 100 HP 4wd tractor (12k pounds) can't travel without having much trouble. It may leave ruts in areas, but no more than 1' deep at most. He is considering building a 12 acre pond with average depth of 6 feet (strictly a guess on my part about depth, but it will at least give me a guideline). The pond will need to be dug out and material dumped somewhere in the field. Still undecided on exact location, but figure travel to dump site 1/2 mile. So 12 acres, average 6' depth, and 1/2 mile to dump material. 1- What equipment combo would be best, and how much material could they move? 2- Any ideas on a land feature for the excavated material that may aesthetically be more appealing than a large pile of dirt?
Hi rutwad I'm no pond expert or even an excavator lol My thoughts are how dry will soil be when you plan to excavate and how WET will the soil below grade get when being excavated this will have a lot to do with cost of the project
my guess is a month long job with 4 or 5 pieces of equipment and operators could be way off but there's my guess does the soil have the ability to retain Water ? Maybe a few test holes could determine if the pond would hold water.
Yair . . . rutwad . Presumably there is some fall in order for the pond to fill from runoff with contour drains? First thing is to shoot some levels, it is a very inefficient use of machinery to get a 1:1 return. If there is some fall and you can even get a couple of feet of water against a bank you could spread the material and make a wide tapered berm/bank on the three down hill sides of the cut. If the digging is okay it sounds like scraper dirt to me . . . but it would be a simple job for excavator and trucks. A lot depends on the type of dirt and how far you are going to haul it. Cheers
Seems an innefficient use of 100 acres to cover 12 acres of it with water 6 feet deep. If you went smaller in area but deeper, you still can have the same amount of water storage, but the losses from evaporation and seepage would be much less.
The dirt definitely holds water. It used to be about a 2 acre very shallow pond. It's in a bottom so I expect it to be wet at some depth regardless of how dry it seems. Because of this I am guessing an excavator needs to be used. Considered a scraper, pull and motored, but if it gets too wet then it becomes useless. Originally figured an excavator and ADT, but how long would it take to load, how long for a round trip to dump area and back (1/2 mile)? What size excavator and ADT? And a dozer would be needed to spread the excavated dirt. How would a tractor pull-scraper do compared to the ADT just for hauling dirt? With JD's autoload feature, how evenly could it spread the material being dumped and would this eliminate the need for a dozer? I figure a dozer will be needed, but would the material be spread well enough that a smaller dozer could be used vs. spreading material dumped by ADT? For pulling 2 loaded scraper pans, could a smaller tractor be used since the tractor isn't having to load them?
My guess would be 4 or 5 Volvo A40's, a 45 ton hoe with an oversized bucket, and a D6 to spread and fix up the haul road. I would assume 8 weeks running 8 hour days + Saturdays with no break downs (not including warm up, shut down time, fueling and maintenance). It will take longer if you get into de-watering and if you can't load the trucks down in the cut. There'll be a couple of weeks of dozer work after all the dirt has been moved. Forget using anything that could be described as "small" You're looking at over 7,000 loads in an A40.
6' cut over 12 acres makes for 116k yards. You'll certainly want to take advantage of the existing topography, and you'll want a fleet of whatever is going to move the dirt. Probably would be a good idea to get an experienced local to game plan it for you.
There better be a point to this project because there is no way to do it cheaply, it's a pretty huge undertaking. Especially for someone with limited experience.
Permit done? Here a 12 acre pond with no cat tails damaged digging it costs around $100,000 in permits and about 3 years of wrangling to acquire.