Drainage - Looking to 'Tile' an acre or so

[crbr]

Thanks for the pictures.

 

[rambler]

I hear all the time about major field tiling jobs, but I wonder how effective it really is. Though I have no hands on experience with those large scale installations.

JB.

Very effective.

About 1/2 my farm was only good for hay back in the 1940s. Yellow clay ground, little clay based top soil or peat ground, and perhaps 120 feet of yellow or blue clay the glaciers scraped off of Canada.

It won't dry out the surface in a day when it's clay. But it spends 24/7 draining out the groundwater to a depth of 2-3 feet, so their is room for more rainfall, and roots get air and less saturation than these wet spots would give.

In the old days they just tiled along the low spots.

Then they started tiling every 100 feet to drain out an area. Now they are tiling ever 80 to 40 feet apart, and the closer the tile, the shallower it is.

You need to bed the tile properly to keep it from squishing - a nice roun bottom trench that fits the tile, or bed it in gravel.

You want a nice slope of .10% or so - that is not much of a slope at all, but it needs to be very steady, no ups & downs.

It works well if done properly. You use tile with slits in it.

The big thing these days is getting permission from the govt. ou homeowners can get away with anything I suppose, me I'd have to pay a fine, remove the tile, and perhaps create extra wetlands if I were to drain something the govt calls a wetland.

--->Paul

 

[bp fick]

In the late 1960's or early '70s, tiling became cost effective and seen as an investment in land improvement. Our family's 170 year old Bay County, MI farm got tiled, as did many of the neighbors for this reason. It allowed us to get on it earlier in spring, thus effectively increasing the growing season. It also gave us flexibility as to timing. It broadened the window or time frame of doing field work in spring, as the ground dried out much, much quicker. This is flat, heavy, but insanely rich soil.