In a previous article I featured the improvement of a cut up farm gateway. The farmer hired an excavator to do drainage work and took the opportunity to remove the badly trafficked soil at a number of gateways and to put down clean stone, all at a low cost. Some 18 months later how is the job working out?

Pictures one, two, three and four

The job was done in October 2012 – a wet time, with the mud and water visible in the pictures. We see there is a drinking trough beside the gateway – not a good idea because it encourages cattle to stand around the gate.

The excavator lifted about 12 inches of topsoil. Skinning off less would have saved stone and produced less spoils, but it could be false economy.

With silage equipment and slurry tankers using this gateway, a decent stone pad is needed and it’s a job you want to do just once.

Clean blocks from an old shed were tipped in from a trailer, levelled and tracked. The material contained both large and fine stone and therefore would bind together well. Because it was blocky it needed a bit of finer material on top for a suitable walking surface.

Tracking-in with the excavator worked fine here – there was no need to add to the cost by hiring a roller. Note that tracking with an excavator, even a big one such as the 20t machine used here, does not give enough compaction to support concrete or a tarmacadam topcoat. Excavator pads are designed to tread lightly.

Picture five

This was the gateway last November, after 12 months of use. The surface is holding up well against quite a bit of wheel traffic.

The ground around the water trough is in quite good shape too.

Picture six

This was the gate earlier this week. Despite all the rain over the past two months the gateway is still in good shape.

This is low cost work. A decent 13t excavator will do most of the digging out needed here in an hour. If kept supplied with stone, it will also do the levelling and tracking in well under an hour.

The 20t machine used here worked even quicker. The spoils lifted were taken away by the farmer’s tractor and trailer and used to fill holes and that added another hour of work for the excavator. But – given that he didn’t have to buy-in stone – each of the gateways done would have cost the farmer about €100 in digger hire, plus some of his own time.

Buying-in stone would have added a lot to the cost. The farmer here could have bought-in suitable crushed concrete, etc, for about €100 per load, plus VAT. He would have used two loads in most gateways, but four here to do the water trough.