Hey guys! Brian and Terry here with another installment in our Forest to Farm series here on Survival Dispatch. Today we are going look at having the giant stumps on our property being removed. This is something we wanted to do ourselves, but it just wasn’t practical. We couldn’t rent anything locally to do it, so it was going to be a large expense from an hour and a half away. We got fortunate to finally find someone honest and willing to come out.
The guy that came out initially brought his 12,000-pound Kubota excavator. It was doing a decent job on the smaller of the stumps but was struggling with parts of them. After two and a half stumps, he had to stop for fear of damaging his machine. These stumps were from Loblolly pines that were over 100 feet tall. They protruded into the ground several feet and were over three feet wide at the base. He made a valiant effort with his new machine, but we completely understood having to stop.
He works with his brother who has a much bigger, 44,000-pound Komatsu excavator. He called his brother who happened to have the machine at home and had him load it up. Wow…the difference it made was amazing, to say the least!
He made short work of the huge stumps, averaging about 8 minutes per stump. That time included filling the holes and moving to the next spot. It was definitely cool to watch take place.
What really caught our attention was the money saved by using the more expensive machine. The smaller excavator was $75 per hour. The larger machine was right at $150 per hour. We managed to time-lapse both machines at the same rate. We compared them working for 30 minutes.
After about 30 minutes on a smaller, but still large, stump, the 12,000-pound machine managed to dig up one stump. In the same amount of time the 44,000-pound excavator dug up seven stumps. Yes, the smaller machine seems like a better price, but by paying more we got seven times as much work done in the same amount of time. This is a HUGE savings. So, think about your investment when it comes to something like this. Really research what you will be paying to have done, and what other options are available for the same task. You could end up saving yourself a lot of money in the long run.
We hope you enjoyed today’s post and found it helpful if you are going to be attempting something like this. Be sure to check back often as we move forward with our homestead project. We’ve got a lot of great content on the way! Thanks for stopping by!