Building a farm road dozer, excavator, or ?

Absolutely CM , Well said !
For the fabric to work on a road bed the stone has to be thick enough to where it act's as ballast in the center to keep it from pushing up to the surface .

We use it allot behind gabion basket & paver walls to keep dirt / backfill from filtering through .
Works good on field tile repairs as well . Have several customers that still have old school clay tile draining a field . What happens over time is the gap between the tile will spread open and a sink hole develops . To speed up the process we dig down to the top of the tile without disturbing it . Cut a 4' X 4' square of cloth to lay over the area and backfill .
Works good for livestock as well . Had a customer with complaint area in front of the horse barn was muddy all the time . She has 6 of these four legged erosion creating beasts
Over dug the 50' X 50' area 15" deep , lay down cloth and called the stone trucks to fill it with # 53's . It made the horses happy .

Scrub Puller said:

It will vary of course with soil and climate but I reckon the most effective and least cost option for access roads is to do the least amount of work required to give easy access for the owners vehicles, establish wheel tracks across the Prairie and improve it up from there.

Geo-fabric on a farm track? . . . truly?

Cheers.

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Very good point Mate !

The wheel tracks ? That's how a road was first established , some wheel tracks though the pasture / paddock to each building or area tended daily . Wagon master / driver took the best route the land offered keeping in mind soft ground & steep slopes . Sometimes it's better to travel a little further on good ground then take a short cut .

Then some feller got the idea to drop a little stone in the ruts made by the tracks .
Funny part is we still have my Grand Dads tail gate for spreading stone in the wheel tracks .

Why waste money digging out the center of the farm road when it could be growing grass and spread the stone in the wheel tracks where it needs it ?
It's not like rush hour traffic that needs a passing lane .
Good post Scrub !

These are pics of the road path. The first pic is the overall course, connecting to the road below and traveling along the edge of the tillable field and grass along the pond. The other two are my attempt to show the grade hill. It isn't very much, but it isn't 'nothing' either.

The squared off 'box' in blue, by the barn indicates an area which will require quite a bit of dirt removal for grading purposes. I haven't shot the grade, But I suspect the corner marked with an 'X' is approximately 6-8' higher than the barn corner. It funnels any and all water directly towards the barn.

The following post will show the road in a slightly different way.

The rough course of the planned road. The two red lines along crossing the path indicate a rough estimate of the 'steepest' point in which I plan on building up the road approximately 3' through this area in order to alleviate a 'perceived' dip and steeper ascent. This would allow for a gradual and relatively consistent grade throughout most of the course of the road. Otherwise, that one spot has a pointedly higher grade, than the rest of the road.

Could you make some kind of deal with your neighbor for shared use of his driveway? Maybe you take care of the maintenance or some other arrangement. I can't see it all but it looks like they are just accessing bins and a machine shed.

Planedriver said:

Could you make some kind of deal with your neighbor for shared use of his driveway? Maybe you take care of the maintenance or some other arrangement. I can't see it all but it looks like they are just accessing bins and a machine shed.

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I thought about it, but I think that when all is said and done, I'd rather have access via my own road. They have already allowed us to use the road for temporary access, and his wife is worried we are going to tear it up, driving on it when it rains. I want good neighbors... and I don't want to create strife with her.

You are on the right track. Keep the neighbors happy.....

Ever since I was a child, I had always had a fascination with road roller compactors when my town was becoming urbanized.
I know they work well on ground soil, but do they really work for cement roads?

When stockpiling topsoil and dirt...

Any tips?

I have a 6yd scraper, so I should be able to remove it for future use. My 'thought' is that I just scrape it and take it to a dump sight where I create a mound that I driver over and over again, building it higher and higher. But I really don't know and it seems like such an obvious thing... that apparently, no one puts any information out about the details and logistics of doing it.

My other concern is determining when I am no longer in topsoil and into the clay. I understand 'color change' etc. But is that about the only way to know when I've moved from topsoil to subsoil? I have Maury soils throughout my place. But I know, I've gotten into clay on at least one part of the place below about 3ft.

With the cut, should I just go until level and ignore that it might still be in topsoil? What about half the road (downhill side) being on topsoil and the top side of the cut getting into clay? does that cause any issues with road stability long term? I suspect that a large portion of the road will be part topsoil and part clay, if I make a straight cut into the shallow slopes.

Is there any issue using clay 'fill' to fill in dips in the road without first removing topsoil completely? In one area, I need to build up the road about 1-2' in order to smooth out the grade. And in order to get down to clay, I might have to remove 1-2ft of topsoil making the 'dip' even deeper. I want to do what will make for the best road long term, but don't want to chase small % improvement that won't really make a difference in the road stability and usability.

Back when I did dirt work, I would normally take off 3"-6" at the most. Peel everything back with a 6 way dozer blade and cast to the sides. Fill in the cut with local gravels (bank run - always the cheapest solution) and about 2"-4" above original grade. I would then peel the topsoil back to the edges of the fill and blade to sloped grade to provide and easy to maintain slope that still allowed water to flow off well.

Normally, any new drive will pump for a while until the gravel is packed and there is a good dry out of the soils. After my customers had finished their construction work on new residences, the drive would be topcoated with limestone or chert rock. These gravels were much more expensive but only needed as a top coat to provide the best and most durable surface that would stay locked in place and wash away water without much penetration.

Unless you are building a road across a swamp, the fabric idea is the biggest waste of money that you will ever spend on a driveway. Clay is only a problem when wet or disturbed, otherwise it is a firm base suitable for any driveway. Spend more on fill gravel, let the dry season firm up the road, regrade and then topcoat with premium materials. Also, if you want to spend a lot, use nothing but limestone and start with a lift of #6, then #4, then #2 and then 33c or dense grade. In your clay soil, that which seems to concern you, this method would set up a road suitable for interstate traffic.

Yair . . .
Gotcha td25c . . . and I reckon treemuncher's comments pretty much say it all.

Cheers.

Is there not an option to route the road on the other side of the tillable field?
Impossible to tell from photos, of course, but if it was a little flatter and higher there it could be much easier to maintain down the track.....no pun intended!

Great advice so far. As to the compactor. You have the perfect machine. Tractor and scraper with 6 yards of dirt will compact as good as anything. Them tires will find the soft spots and push them down. Run the whole thing down, regrade and pack it again. Repeat until the soft spots disappear. The only time you'll need any of those fancy materials is if you have a "soft spot" that won't come out of it. Deal with them if or when they show up.
You seem to have a good handle on what is needed for drainage and that will make or break your road.

Now go burn some diesel!!!

WWII brought the end of my family being farmers. My father was a farmer at heart. His obsession with stewardship predated the concept of environmentalism. We live next to 200,000 acres of Green Mountain National Forest. There were no gates, or fences in my youth. If I had been caught on forest roads with a vehicle when the roads were wet, consequences would be dire! He collected rock from his garden, the forest, or wherever he could to fill ruts. Drainage became obsession. He was quick to teach that allowing your tires into a mud hole, pothole, or rut was encouraging erosion. Roads were 1-1/2 vehicle wide. Tires always straddled the ruts. Keep your wheels high, and dry. This almost always meant two wheels in the center of the road.

These days I am less poor than then, I can occasionally splurge on rock for roads. Nearby, I can get screened stone delivered seasonally as they have surpluses. Year round I can buy Calcium Carbonate crushed. It comes in 1-3/4" drainage stone, or 5"-. With trucking factored it's twice the price.

One way or the other, standing water is replaced with stone. It's seldom a one time thing. A Friday after work run to the quarry is hand shoveled into the wet spots. Roads are continuously improved.

That isn't to say a new road doesn't require moving of earth. I'm no engineer, but I do grasp the concept of physics as it applies to road construction. Water must be managed. Gravity too is very important. Side hill roads must not get too steep, but they need to keep roadbed on cut soil. Fill soil is for shoulders. I favor ditch on the uphill side, with crown, others say tilt the whole road. Either way the cut above the road must not be steep enough to collapse onto the road.

Willie

It sounds like I might be overthinking this road build. I tend to do that at times.

My plan, after your information, is to remove the topsoil for storage along the area of the cut. Make the cut and ditch 'level' from the hillside, with weight bearing road on cut only. Pack it with a filled bucket, tractor, and filled scraper in lifts of about 6" on the 'dip' area (which will be the only fill area which is driven upon), culverts, crown it, and rock it. After your counsel, I will forgo the fabric in lieu of more rock as long as nothing appears soft, and if so, I will fabric only that specific area.

Should be a nice Saturday afternoon's work...........

Factoring the inevitable voices telling you to do other tasks, it might run into two Saturday afternoons.

I have the road all laid out with stakes and elevations.

I will be using my 6yd scraper to remove as much topsoil as possible for stockpiling. (in the cut)

I've used the dirt pan before, using it on unworked ground. But now I have a disc. Given the photos above, do you think it would be easier to fill if the soil is 'virgin' or 'disced' ? I'd like to minimize switching implements as much as possible, but I want to make everything work as well as possible, too.

Would running a disc up and down the road, several times make it any easier to load? I've never tried it, and don't want to hamstring myself by 'trying it' without having a good idea of the likely outcome.

What kind of disk do you have? A small farm disk is usually of little use on virgin land. A heavy farm disk may not be too bad, a double offset would probably work and a Rome would really cut.

Construction crews use very heavy discs to loosen the soil for easier working and loading. No different than digging a hole in virgin ground compared to digging a hole in tilled garden soil. The only thing is disc down to the level and then use your pan or box blade to cut the finish level. If you go too deep you'll just have to drive on it to pack it really well before adding gravel.

It is a relatively small, 8' farm disc. It isn't very heavy, going about 3-4" into virgin soil. I have ripper shanks on a box blade that would go about 6-8". Perhaps the box blade shanks would be worth it.