Finally, I have bought a tipping trailer.

It has already done a lot.

As I have mentioned endlessly, I have been slowly filling a ruined/mined paddock with green waste, topsoil, woodchip, horse manure, discarded bales, dead sheep.....In theory to level it I would need some 2000 cubic metres. That's not possible by me manually collecting material. And not viable to buy it in.

Doesn't look so bad in this pic, but this is the mined paddock that we are filling. The dark patch up the back is a hole you could have parked a bus in. In the right near the fence is what looks like a small gully. When you are standing there its 1.5 metres deep, 3 metres wide and more than 10 metres in length.

The sunlight in this pic helps show the contours., but you still don't get a sense of the scale of the holes. The fence posts are almost 2 metres high. In the background...See the steep embankment? That was the original level of the soil in this paddock before it was stripped.

So I have been doing a halfway approach....aiming to level the perimeter of the paddock, and then roughly level the interior by filling the enormous potholes, a trailer-load at a time.

Its been going on for a few years. In that time I've sourced lots of different fills, but they all involve me loading them into a trailer and then unloading at my end. It is a lot of work, and if you stop and think of how much there is to go its disheartening.

But the tipping trailer changes the game.

For one thing, its a lot bigger than my small, hardworking trailer. Notionally it will carry 5 cubic metres (3.5 tons) of material. So one pickup multiplies how much I can move. But with the tipping function I don't have to shovel it all out again at this end, which is a massive decrease in the workload. This really came to the forefront last week.

My neighbour had some building work done a couple of years ago. To clear and level the site a huge amount of soil was graded into a pile. Its been there ever since, blocking the layout of their farm. I asked them if I could take it all away, hired a digger and operator for two days, and we took it on.

One of three piles of topsoil available for removal

The piles were only a couple of hundred metres from my paddock, but there's no access between the properties, so we had to go the long way....from my paddock to theirs is about 2 km! So apart from the digging and dumping there was quite a bit of travel time. I underestimated how much we could do. In two full days we only cleared two of the piles. Tony has a five metre truck and we were filling my trailer with 2 and a half metres. I lost count of how many trips I did, but Tony tracked his. We moved more than 140 metres of topsoil.

Some of it came from foundational digging, so it was clay subsoil mixed with river stones. Tony took all that and dropped it around the perimeter. I will still have to pick out the big boulders, but it will add to the perimeter road. I took the better soil and dropped it in piles around the paddock, filling as many cavities as I could.

The only drawback so far with doing it this way it I finish up with a big pile in one spot that will need to be graded/raked out. I resist buying endless farm implements to add to the stockpile of attachments for my tractor, but I can see that a grader blade would earn its keep.

140 cubic metres of soil later.....

As a trade-off for the free soil I took away big pile of farm rubbish that had accumulated next to one of the piles. Tony shook his head in dismay when I asked him, in the last load, to scrape it all up and put it into my trailer. As a chap whose business is moving soil he has had trouble at the local tip...they will only take 2 metres from an operator a day, and they give him a hard time when he shows up. I pretty much had to empty the trailer at my place into various stacks...scrap metal, hard plastic, soft plastic etc. All perfectly reasonable...everyone should do that with their rubbish!...but it was so much it took me two days. But at the tip they were quite pleasant, happy that I had sorted it all out.

Now I need to think about levelling all those piles of dirt!

( I have suggested to Tony that he could bring unwanted loads of soil to my place, for free. If, say, someone in Myrtleford was digging out a swimming pool and he had a lot to get rid of. But its not that simple. For him in his truck its 25 minutes to my place, so its an hour's time lost. I've offered to pay for his time, and also suggested I could come to his site and receive a load in the tipping trailer, but so far he hasn't thought that would work. )