|
Rolla, ND | The units Agvise sells work well. With the small diameter of the cylinder, the speed isn't bad. You've basically got 30 inches of stroke.
You take a full size extended cab pickup. Chevy is what most use.
You take out the front seat and install a bucket seat for the driver, a seat a little lower than original is nicest.
Then you cut a hole in the floor on the passenger side.
Might have to move the exhaust system a bit.
Install the crossmember. Agvise sells that too, if you haven't done it before their mount can simplyfy things but you can build your own too. One thing is especially for frozen soil, I would use a wider flange on the frame. Lots of guys use what they sell and weld them on and it works fine. I'm just Mr. overkill building things. I use a wider piece of heavy angle and bolt it on. If you use an old Ford you have to do a real good job, their frame was real thin and with welding you can easily get them to break the frame of the pickup.
If you do a good job, you can sit in the seat and not have to lean over to put the probe on the cylinder. Height should be so you can put the soil probe on without having to push it in the ground with your hand. Soil probes can be trimmed a bit to fine tune the fit.
With the cylinder close to the center of the pickup like that, you can push through frozen soil just fine. The only times you can't is if there is too much moisture or bad compaction. If you froze up fairly dry, it doesn't probe much harder than really dry clay. Keep your foot on the brake, rolling a pickup ahead is hard on soil probes.
If there is snow, it's best not to keep the cab too hot. If you run a hot probe through the snow and it melts the snow, it does a couple of things, one, it's a bit messier. Two you can really freeze it into the ground hard. You make water going in, when the probe stops it can freeze quick and then the probe locks in and you can have a bugger of a time getting it to pop loose.
Then you are almost done, you just need to mount your handheld or laptop in the cab, mount a gps unit and away you go.
When you are done you take off the hydralic cylinder, unbolt the frame and drop that off and you can put tin over the hole and put the seat back in.
For driving around with the cylinder in. You can cut a floor mat to fit around the cylinder and keep snow, and water out. At least some of the time. Soil testing in the spring I've had mud dripping from the ceiling more than once. I did a bellyflop with the pickup a couple of times where I couldn't see out the windshield afterwards, but it doesn't look like you are in the prairie potholl region so you probably wouldn't get to experience that even if you did sample in the spring. You've got to have the hole in the floor big enough so it doesn't touch the soil test frame even with the flex from pushing.
And by the way, spring sampling really sucks. You get thawed soil on top with frozen belowe and what happens is there is almost always a soft layer in the transition. That smears and the frozen soil drives into it so hard you literally can't get it out. If you throw the probe in a warm spot for a couple of days it seems to dry out enough with our clays it relaxes just enough you can beat it out. Funny how farmes will think you can't sample with an inch or two of frozen soil on top think nothing of it with an inch or two of thawed soil.
You get real good cores with frozen soil, and I've had good luck. In the spring thaw, there can be a few days where the nitrogen results will go through the roof and then come down again. It doesn't happen all the time but when it does you just sample that few days over again. I've pretty well quit spring sampling anyway unless a customer gets some new land anyway. There's no real window to take a good sample and get results by the time the guy wanted them. He's ready to go when the top few inches will work without smearing and for a good sample you need the top couple of feet to be where it doesn't smear. Fields usually start sampling well about the time the grain starts to poke through. | |
|
Soil Sampling Setup
