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Southern Missouri | You can stand on top of my bins and as far as you can see every field is precision leveled ,leveling land in our area is done just as much for drainage as it is for irrigation, both are very important to our land here,while you’re standing on top those bins looking around at that miles and miles of graded irrigated land you will see zero,zero pivots,the amount of acres you’d be looking at if pivots were there that the pivot would not hit with water would be many many thousands of acres,land here that for some reason can’t be leveled and irrigated is just about impossible to get anyone to farm,leveled irrigated brings 12000 an acre and rents for a lot.A long time ago a few pivots were tried here,they were pulled down and hauled off.I have
bought several farms over the years that at one time had a pivot but was taken down and graded and furrow irrigated so you could irrigate 100 percent of it instead of just part of it.the land is so flat here that pivot tracks also stop the drainage flow down our raised beds, as a young man laser leveling here was 50 cents per yard moved ,then it went to around a dollar a yard ,and now is more like dollar and a half to two dollars per yard ,typical yardage per acre here to laser level would be 300 yards per acre to about 600 yards per acre,you can stick a hole in the ground anywhere you want to here and turbine out 3000 gal per minute,move over 10 feet put in another one if you want,they’ll pump 3000 gal a minute 24 7 365 if you wanted to do it,we have lots of good water,my dad leveled his first field in 1962 and started pumping centrifugal water there,field has been heavily irrigated every year since then,you can still pump centrifugal water on that ground today,underground water level is same as it was in 1962.
When that field was graded in 1962 it had a cut fill map made for it,all done by hand ,transit,paper and adding machine ,now they drive a pickup around on it receiving gps signals and just about as fast as he can drive back to the shop it’ll have a cut fill map spit out ,whether you want continuous slope in each direction or just best fit for just drainage,that software has been around here for years.
Edited by sloughclub 2/21/2021 21:00
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Cost to level land to grade
