A few weeks ago I wrote Part 1 of Pasture and Irrigation Renovation. I ended that post with the sheep coming in from the pasture for the last time and a lot of heavy equipment in their place. A lot went on for a couple of weeks and then there was a lull. I have to go back and find the photos I took at each step.

There was still more work for us (Dan) to do. Here he is removing the wood and stakes we had used to make the ditch more functional near the barn and taking out the culvert.

Before work began we were asked to hold a meeting with the contractors where we could all listen to a representative of the tribal people who used to live in the area. He showed photos of the cultural items that one might find when soil is disturbed and talked about procedures if something was found.

The first job was to remove the old cement foundation that ran north to south over 3/4 of our property. We suspect it was the floor of an old barn–I don’t know what else it would have been. That would have been a big barn and maybe someday I’ll be able to talk to a local history buff who knows what this was. It doesn’t really matter–it’s just that we have always had to work around it. Part of it was broken apart to put the original irrigation ditch through and, even though grass will grow on top in the winter, it dries out in summer and the desirable pasture plants don’t grow there. NRCS calls this job “obstruction removal”.

Brett is the contractor with the heavy equipment. He first scraped the layer of dirt and grass off the top of the cement. Most of the concrete was only 2″ to 3″ inches thick and a lot of it broke into smaller crumbly pieces . The borders were a lot larger however.

Brett used the excavator to scoop up chunks of broken concrete.

We found that a clay pipe ran the length of the concrete.

Brett used the teeth on the track loader to rake through the dirt and find the concrete chunks.

The chunks were loaded into a truck for removal to a place where they’d get broken up even more for use in road bed material.

Eventually the pile of dirt that was scraped off the top was incorporated back into the area where it had been.

While Brett was working on this part, Dan spread the rest of the composted manure pile.

This part of the job took about three days using all this equipment.