Drain plows / ploughs are a new concept in NZ, but have been in use in America for two decades, (plow is the american spelling for plough). Currently Soilmax have sold some three thousand plows. They have superseded both backhoes and trenchers which are comparatively slow and expensive to operate. A basic plow has just three grease points and one significant wearing part, (the shoe), which costs $250 to replace after about fifty thousand metres.
Installing 110mm pipe 1.1m deep
These machines install drains carefully, forming a circular base for the pipe to bed into and crumbling topsoil in a column above the pipe to provide a permanently porous layer for rapid water filtration. You can drive back along the drain line to compress the heaved earth, but best practise is to leave it to settle naturally for a few months first.
Soilmax plows are built out a an American military grade steel called T1. It is the strongest steel available, ( not available in NZ), and allows the plow to be lighter, stronger, slimmer and consequently easier to pull than the other brands in the market. Combined with their state of the art GPS gradient control Intellislope its no wonder that Soilmax sells about 80% of the drainplows in the world.
Working with our local engineers TMS we have designed and built a mounted pipe reel to direct feed our NZ 100 metre coils of pipe. The Americans use huge 1200 ft coils of pipe and specialised pipe carts towed by a separate tractor laying the pipe in the field prior to plowing. Using a mounted reel saves plenty of labour and machinery time in our NZ conditions.
There are three methods of gradient control.
- A simple water level and depth chain which is fine when draining on slopes greater than 1.5 degrees, ( this is what we use 90% of the time on our rolling ground).
- Laser control which is accurate, but a little inflexible and slow to setup.
- Intellislope GPS control which is accurate, flexible, quick and the best long term option. www.intellislope.com
For more information on plows go to www.soilmax.com or give us a call.
