Written by Gwen Brittain
You may choose to add drainage ditches to your farm because full field earthwork is not an option for you. T3RRA Ditch is our advanced in-cab ditching system. You can survey & design drains one at a time or create drains across a field automatically with the Auto Drains tool. Some reasons for choosing drain designs over full field designs might include the following:
- Shallow topsoil depths across the field and digging too deep would hit the hard pan.
- Time limitations for performing dirt moving projects before planting.
- The land is under a short term lease and the costs associated with a full field project cannot be justified.
Whatever the reason, full field land forming is just not the best option. There are a broad range of scenarios for drain projects with T3RRA Ditch. Consider the two following cases:
Farmer A directly drives the path of a drain – surveying the elevations with T3RRA along the way then designs a profile and a cross section to make the water flow while moving as little dirt as possible. Finally the implement is height controlled to cut exactly to the desired depths along the drain with T3RRA and iGrade.
Farmer B surveys the whole field or imports full field elevation data and chooses T3RRA’s Auto Drains tool then performs water flow simulations and uses the ‘view depressions’ tool. Auto Drains is performed to plot the best ways of draining the depressions. These paths are exported to the tractor guidance system to allow for automatic steering. At that point, either the ditching is implemented manually with a 3-point hitch ditcher or drain designs are created then cut with automatic blade control with T3RRA and iGrade.
If you reach a stage where you want to do full field landforming, T3RRA Ditch can be upgraded to the fully featured T3RRA Cutta package without penalty.