Agricultural earthmoving Aussie style (Part Two)

by Nick Drew | Thu 11 Dec 2014

Agricultural earthmoving Aussie style (Part Two)

Continuing our look at photos sent in by Michael Bullock who is still working down under and has been engaged in some agricultural earthmoving work in Western Australia.

As mentioned in part one of this blog post, Michael has been working on de-silting dams on farms across a wide area. And in some instances the team have been constructing brand new dams which are used to hold water from the storms, for the animals to drink from during the long hot summer months. One of those new dams is seen here being worked on by a Caterpillar D7H.

In between dam clearance works Michael was also operating a forestry spec Cat D7H dozer, which is also fitted with a front mounted tree pusher bar.

The D7H works paired with another Cat machine in the form of a D8R. The two machines are both towing a container ship anchor chain which is around 150m long. This 1500ha farm was last harvested 4 years ago but since then the trees have regrown from the stumps.

Michael and his work colleague would “chain” the area twice, this action would pull the stumps out of the ground on the second pass. Next year the resulting brash will be burnt under a controlled fire.

Meanwhile back on the de-silting works Michael often encountered problems taking a 52 tonne Volvo EC460BLC excavator into the soft silt. Michael says he got stuck many times but was always lucky enough to extract himself out of trouble!

The use of big machines is essential on these jobs as you need the capacity to bulk the material out quickly, apparently the local farmers were amazed at how much muck one large excavator could shift in a few hours!

Lookout for more action shots from Michael, in the 3^rd and final post in this series next week.

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