Originally Posted by
metric_taper
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.