NE South Dakota Clark, SD | I have a couple questions for you Buckwheat. How deep are your depressions? Do you have creeks/streams or ditches to outlet tile into where you could start 2.5 to 3 foot deep?
A pull-type blade works OK for maintaining ditches, but is not the ideal for making them. If you dig a ditch 2 feet deep and 12 feet wide, that is a lot of dirt to feather out while not building a dam beside your ditch. I scraper works excellent as the removed dirt can be used to fill depressions. I blower such as Liebrecht spreads the dirt out 100+ feet from the ditch and is faster than a scraper due to no dumping time.
AGPS Ditch Pro will do what you want except angle of the blade. This would have to be done manually. Typically you would want a flat bottom ditch and then taper your sides to a farmable slope. This would vary depending on how deep the ditch is.
I would recommend doing the ditch design in GK Technologies Ag Data Mapping Solution. This will show your depressions and help place ditches in the best places to follow the lay of the land. You can then load your design into AGPS and follow that in the field while ditching.
As far as tiling in your area, look into tile availability and freight cost. I talked to a farmer in the Great Falls area that bought a plow before looking into this. Tile was going to have to come from Buxton, ND or Olympia WA. Freight was going to be around $3K per load. That increased cost of tile by almost 50%. He decided he would buy more land at $1000 an acre instead of tiling what he had.
How deep you can pull tile varies alot depending on soils. Your tractor with a mounted plow such as Crary/Waynes Tile Pro would pull 8 inch 4+ foot deep in light soils, but would struggle at the same depth in heavy clay even with preripping. I would guess 5-6 feet deep with 4 inch. Again this will vary with soil types. The first 3 feet are the easy part every foot after that pulls much harder.
If you would like to discuss this, give me a call. My contact info is in my profile.
Picture 1 topography and flow patterns. Picture 2 flow patterns and depressions over 6 inches deep. Picture 3 Depressions and ditch layout.
 (Main Farm Section Topo and Flow accumulations.jpg)
 (Main Farm Section Depressions over 6 inches.jpg)
 (Main Farm Section Depressions over 6 inches and Ditches with grade.jpg)
Attachments
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 Main Farm Section Topo and Flow accumulations.jpg (22KB - 55 downloads)
Main Farm Section Depressions over 6 inches.jpg (41KB - 59 downloads)
Main Farm Section Depressions over 6 inches and Ditches with grade.jpg (31KB - 60 downloads)
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