Quote Originally Posted by metric_taper View Post
I think this is a test field for validating design of this sort of tool, but that's a guess, seeing the last few seconds, there's a fairly deep trench that I would guess was from a earlier test pass, or design iteration that left that.

My sister in law's husband is a farmer in northern Minnesota where he has a 30 foot roller to push the rocks into the ground before planting. Sorta a loosing battle with freeze heave every year. And I asked about a picker, and it cleans them up for a few years before new ones come to the surface. Note how narrow this rock picker is, at 8' foot or less (which has been the design for the last 50 years), it would take too much fuel and time to clean 1 square mile of land. Farms up there are in the 4-10 sections size, or larger. All grains, pretty much no live stock anymore. Now that's where the loam is decent, when you get into high alkali soil, or bad lands, that's when I would see live stock. It was cattle up there, here in Iowa, it's hogs.

When they do put the rocks into a wagon pulled by another tractor and operator, they have to get rid of them, and you see long rows of them put on a fence line.

I'm at the southern end of the glaciation that put those rock there. I see big 30" boulders of granite around here. Some fields with the smaller varieties. Very random where the rocks have stayed near the surface to generate this problem.
One of my late uncles at the time far in the future father in law won a small parcel of land(5,500 acres) in a poker game during the big gold strike in Colorado. At the time thought to only be useful for raising sheep since so much of it was peppered with rocks up to about 12" The land laid pretty much fallow for 60 years until my great uncle married his high school sweetheart. For a wedding present They were given their choice of any 3 sections of the land for their homestead. Sometime in the Early 1900s he and she had managed to turn 1 of those sections of land into productive crop producing farmland My grandpa had married the other sister they were also given 3 sections. Eventually huge traction engines littered the valley dragging plows rakes and wagons with 100s of labors picking up rocks claiming the land for fields the 1 brother of the 2 sisters had received his 3 sections when he got married and he set up a crusher to crush the rocks being hauled out of the fields. Now nearly 140 years since the famed poker game there is probably not a pebble larger than a golf ball anywhere on the original 5,500 acres. Some of the highest grade barley in all of Colorado and potatoes are grown there, At one time there must have been more than 50 24inch diameter artesian wells drilled filling miles upon miles of irrigation canals
Pressing the rocks back into the ground must have never entered their minds. Remove them and they are gone forever if others float up to plow depth, remove them as well.