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field tile damage discussion

glennster

glennster

Well-known Member
local coffee shop clutch was talking about a lot of guys having problems with field tiles blowing out. one guy had a tile guy out to fix his and tile guy said the cause lately of so many breaks is the rogator sprayers. they carry a lot of weight on very narrow tires and a 10mph thru the field are breaking tiles as they bounce along. any thoughts??
 
In general I would say that is not a cause. Most tile drains are installed at a depth of 30" or deeper which is to prevent crushing as much as it is to keep from heaving over the winter. Now some guys try to cheat that and go as shallow as 20" or less which makes tile much more prone to crushing. Some soils are slow to perk water down to the field tile so I could envision a situation where a field had a lot of recent rain and somebody decided to push the conditions to get some herbicide or insecticide on ASAP and cut deep ruts to the point of affecting the tile.
 
Probably poor plastics. Everything is being made cheaper for more profit. We have many, many plastic road culverts in place under roads. They have to have 30" of fill on top of them, but many are located on roads that have mostly truck traffic. I would think 160,000 that we can legally haul in MI, over frost and not, would do more damage than a comparatively lightweight rogator. Sure the weight is spread out, but that is still a lot of weight from a truck in one spot.
 
Based on the tracks I have seen in the fields they don't carry that much weight, and they sure don't travel very fast, even in the transit mode. More likely heavy tractors or combines.
 
Based on the blowouts I've seen "if the tile was buried deep enough" it's more from water pressure. To small of a main or outlet plugged water in ditch too high for the outlet and the water upstream in the tile. Or it could be a sand pocket that didn't support the tile good enough.

I have a 12" county main in my south field that would blow out after one of those 100 year rains that happens every five. County finally replaced it with a 15" plastic.
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I had a blowout, or in my case a wash in repaired yesterday. It was a 12" clay. The top of the tile was 14" below the surface of the ground. It was at least 80 years old so I'd say it did pretty well. Just one tile caved in, the rest weren't cracked or damaged. A lot if the tile in my area are in the ground only 16"-18". Most of this tile was hand dug so I don't imagine they wanted to dig any deeper than they could get by with. Some of the tile is laid in potholes that aren't much higher in elevation than the drainage ditch the tile drains into so the tile has to be laid shallow to get enough fall.
 
I should add, the tile I had fixed yesterday was in the end rows right by the edge of the CRP where the grain cart could have driven on its way to load a truck. One grain cart load fills a semi to around 85000 lb so there is a lot of axle weight on the cart. The cart was the first thing I thought of when I found the broken tile.
 
Most hand dug tiles are at least 24-28" deep around here. Yes, there are some modern shallow tiles done so as to be able to reach an outlet.
 
When I was running a Rogator, I traveled well over 10mph!!! If I wasn't covering 1000 acres a day, the boss was ticked. Rogator weighed 28000 empty. 1200 gallons of fertilizer at 11 pounds per gallon =41000 give or take a few.
I doubt that they would bounce over a tile though.
 
wp, as you ran em, last summer near minooka illinois some kid on a ninja motorcyle blasted under a gator traveling down a 2 lane county road. scared the cr*p out of the operator, but unfortunately for the biker the county sherrif saw the whole thing. kid got tossed in jail and they pulled his licence.
 
Think grain carts on wheels could be a factor in tile breakdowns. Some of them hold 1,000 bushels corn, combines are unloaded on the go. So a loaded grain cart may be run all over a field not just the end rows. Possibly 30-35 thousand pound axle loads in their tracks. They compact down into subsoil not just topsoil layers if least bit of wetness in soil is present.
 
All of these points are good. The fact that some of the tile were shallow during earlier times has been affected by the newer equipment. The last few years here it has been either wet in the spring or in the fall so no mercy for the tile.
If you are having blow outs I would suspect a plugged outlet more likely.
I do know that on some of the heavy ground to solve the suckhole problems they have gone to a vent like pipe sticking up out of the ground at the top end of the line so air could get in. Much like a stand pipe for surface water ponding on a field.
 
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