Missouri river bottom south of Sioux City, IA | Exact same conditions here as we are both in this Missouri river bottom. We did a lot of dirt work in the late 60s into the 70s to shape up the ground for drainage and at that time for flood irrigation. Did away with flood irrigation many years ago and use center pivots now. Most of the dirt work was roof toping were it drained into a farmable field ditch then out into a road ditch. Pretty simple design with half mile rows. Put a field ditch across the rows through the center of the field at 1,320 feet. Then run an up slope at 90 degrees to the field ditch in both directions to 660 feet to create the roof top. Then from there run a down slope to your road ditch. If you don’t have road ditches that you can’t drain directly into with your slopes then you may need to create more field ditches.
Your $800-$1200 per acre is not enough if you’re going to need to touch every acre of the field to get it to drain. It cost us that much per acre in 1996 to do an 80 acre field. We do our own and some custom work now and it’s done by the hour. Been using RTK GPS for grade control for over 15 years.
Tom N.
 (Cat 621 & 631 scrapers (full).jpg)
Attachments
----------------
 Cat 621 & 631 scrapers (full).jpg (78KB - 52 downloads)
|
Cost to level land to grade
