Mowing 32 acres with a 4' mower

[Spiveyman]

Some things are worth being hired out, you just have ot learn which.

Couldn't agree more. Takes me about 3 minutes to call a guy and have him mow my 170 acres with his huge John Deere and a batwing.

 

[patrick_g]

Clint, The description of my property involved a nail in a tree so many feet from the boundary. The tree was removed a couple years ago. Luckily it was not an actual part of the boundary but just a land mark to help find a buried metal pin (vertical rebar) driven below the surface of the edge of the section line.

I have an ongoing problem because a previous surveyor erroneously assumed that my quarter was of standard size. The legal description of my propoerty has a less and except section that describes a 1.2 acre lot cut out of my property that I do not own. Unfortunately the description doesn't match reality and the property lines are off by about 5-6 feet E-W . The lot is sized correctly but the legal description is in error as to its precise location. My "quarter" is about 10-12 feet larger E-W than the standard (2640 ft or half mile.) The bottom line is that after allowing for the quarter being larger and having 1.2 acres cut out it is essentially a wash and I have 160 acres MOL.

Now before some eastern city boy asks about MOL... MOL is More Or Less, i.e. approximately. Lots of acreages are sold as xxx acres MOL. The MOL being a "fudge factor" in the absence of a good survey. When land holdings exceed several city blocks for small farms as they do here, measuring perfection is not a big deal.

Pat

 

[Spiveyman]

Put in perspective. A quarter section (160 acres) is a very common size land holding here and certainly not associated with bragin' rights. I don't know a single cattleman with less land than me.

Funny how things are different in different sections of the country. 640 acres here in central KY would cost you several million dollars due to all of the development, but you could run a pretty good size herd on that. My papaw routinely runs about 40 head on a 25 acre stretch of land and can usually get enough hay to winter them too without having to buy any. I have a friend running 45 head on 30 acres, I gave him 6 bales of hay last year, that's all he was short. So 640 acres would support maybe 1,024 head at those rates, except for the whole drought thing this year.

 

[Cacinok]

That section correction thing, odd as it is, at least has a rationale. Come visit Boston sometime and travel on Milk St which now is lined with 40 story office buildings carefully aligned on a road that meanders, literally, like a cow path. Even Bostonians cannot figure out the roads in the colonial section of town. Only the cows understand the logic.

a friend of mine lives in Boston and he has commented on that street. is it named "milk st" b/c it was an old cow path?

 

[Cacinok]

Clint, The description of my property involved a nail in a tree so many feet from the boundary. The tree was removed a couple years ago. Luckily it was not an actual part of the boundary but just a land mark to help find a buried metal pin (vertical rebar) driven below the surface of the edge of the section line.

I have an ongoing problem because a previous surveyor erroneously assumed that my quarter was of standard size. The legal description of my propoerty has a less and except section that describes a 1.2 acre lot cut out of my property that I do not own. Unfortunately the description doesn't match reality and the property lines are off by about 5-6 feet E-W . The lot is sized correctly but the legal description is in error as to its precise location. My "quarter" is about 10-12 feet larger E-W than the standard (2640 ft or half mile.) The bottom line is that after allowing for the quarter being larger and having 1.2 acres cut out it is essentially a wash and I have 160 acres MOL.

Now before some eastern city boy asks about MOL... MOL is More Or Less, i.e. approximately. Lots of acreages are sold as xxx acres MOL. The MOL being a "fudge factor" in the absence of a good survey. When land holdings exceed several city blocks for small farms as they do here, measuring perfection is not a big deal.

Pat

Pat, I've seen that nail in the tree trick and it actually works well, much easier to track down the pins, unless of course the tree disappears. Unfortunately, I've seen situations, like yours, where the surveyor buggers up the survey.

On our present piece of property, the guy who owned the property prior to the guy we bought it from, carved out and sold what was supposed to be 10 acres. When we had it surveyed, it turned out it was actually 9.5. If you added in the extra .5 acre, it would have put the fence line about 15' from our front door, in which case we would not have purchased the house and property. Evidently when they carved out the "10" acres, they just roughly measured themselves. oops. So when we closed our seller had to buy .5 acres and have our legal description redone to include it, so there were two closings and two new legals that our seller had to take care of.

We also found, during the survey, that the fence on the NE corner of our property was 25' N of the pin. The fence eventually, as it travels west, travels south and at some point rejoins the correct property line. The fence has been there for quite some time. I'll leave it, I don't think I'll worry about adversely possessing it either. If our neighbor wants it back, he can move the fence and subsequent large trees that have grown.

Good to see you're still posting away, btw.

Clint.

 

[patrick_g]

Clint, Unfortunately the erroneous survey predated my purchase by a number of years and was now "aged fact" so to speak. There is no gain or loss of land area irrespective of the error. The lot enclosed by the legal description in the "less and except"section of the front page of a two volume 3-4 inch thick abstract of deed is properly described as 150x350 ft. The error is that the legal description doesn't (and never did) match the physical fact.

If you follow the directions given in the abstract of deed you get an identical rectangle as reality, just that it is 5-6 ft off E-W. Makes a difference when it comes to fences. It is a darned if you do darned if you don't dilemma. I don't want to fence where the description says as it puts my cattle fence close to the owner's bedroom window. I prefer giving her a break and fencing compatible with the existing fence.

The rub is that when she sells the new owner will only have the deed for guidance and it will show the N-S fences to be mis located when in fact they were preexisting to the erroneous survey and it is the survey that is in error.

I wonder what it takes to be a surveyor in these parts, a listing in the phone book?

Pat

 

[QRTRHRS]

Like many other, I started out with a 6' Landpride when we bought our 30 acre property. In all, about 25 of the 30 acres were open, some in crops, some overgrown, etc. I fenced off about 4 or 5 acres of the only decent grass to get started.

That 6' was okay for the small pasture but when I started to tackle the fields, well, forget it. I got this farmer to use roundup with no till corn for two years to get rid of the briars, etc. and so I would not have to deal with them.

The spring after his second corn crop, the farmer got sick with cancer and died so I went out and picked up my older 4x4 Case with CAH and a 15' batwing.

Sitting in that cooled cab, listening to the radio, while cutting felt like I died and went to heaven compared to my open station compact.

Even though that 15' mower makes maintaining 25 fenced acres of pasture go pretty quickly, I think a 12' would have been better for ease of getting around.

 

[LBrown59]

Even though that 15' mower makes maintaining 25 fenced acres of pasture go pretty quickly, I think a 12' would have been better for ease of getting around.

How many feet per acre do you need?

 

[Robert_in_NY]

As many that you can afford and still get the job done in a time frame that you set for yourself.

 

[ragkar]

Assuming the 32 acre guy with 4 ft mower is driving at 3 mph and cutting 3.5ft wide per pass, he can mow 924 sq ft at most per minute.
Therefore he will need at the minimum 1508 minutes (25 hrs) to mow 32 acres. Double that to allow for problems and the number is 50 hours.
Of course he will need to mow it once a week!