Mud season solutions begin at the bottom
- John Lorson
- January 30, 2021
- 725
If mud season is making you crazy and the lanes traveled by your livestock are seeing the worst of the freeze-thaw cycle that happens on a near daily basis at this time of year in Ohio, geotextile fabric is an ideal first step in constructing a livestock lane or drive that can hold up to heavy traffic and constantly changing weather conditions.
The fabric is laid down directly over an excavated sub-base of soil, then topped with one of several different configurations of limestone and provides several key elements for a lasting management practice: load dispersal, durability and drainage.
Geotextile fabric comes in many different “flavors” for many different applications. The product we carry here at Holmes SWCD is a nonwoven underlayment that serves to disperse the weight of an individual foot, hoof, tire or track-tread over a broad area.
The easiest way to picture this is to imagine a bowl of cherry gelatin. If you stick your finger into that gelatin, there’s going to be nothing to stop you from punching right through to the bottom of the bowl. Now imagine you pull a sheet of plastic wrap across that bowl and try the same trick. The weight of your mischievous finger spreads out across the face of the plastic wrap. If you want to make it the whole way to the bottom of the bowl, it’s going to take a lot more force than simply punching into the gelatin alone.
That’s exactly what the geotextile does under the focused weight above it. Needless to say, your sub-base material (whatever you’ve chosen to build upon) should never be the consistency of gelatin. It’s easy to imagine the damage the force from a single hoof under a 1,300-pound cow can do to unprotected soils.
Durability comes from quality engineering, testing and manufacturing, and that durability is what keeps your valuable limestone from disappearing into the sub-base below. The fabric must meet a whole litany of standards before it arrives at your project.
The product we offer at Holmes SWCD meets the rigorous research standards required by the USDA NRCS. An interesting observation of this durability came to me a few years ago when we needed to excavate and relocate a heavily used cattle crossing that had been constructed with our geotextile as its base layer over 20 years prior. We were pleasantly surprised to find the fabric nearly as good as new underneath the limestone base course and top dressing.
The final critical element in a good geotextile underlayment is drainage. By design our geotextile is permeable to water, but soil particles are too large to pass through. Without the ability to move moisture through this layer, a trail, lot or livestock watering pad would become a sodden mess that would “blow up” with the first hard freeze as water trapped underneath the stone would freeze, expand and heave.
If mud season has given you all you can take and you’re looking for solutions to the mess, give us a call at Holmes SWCD. We’ve got the expertise and material to set you on a cleaner path. Call 330-674-2811 ext. 3, email Holmes.SWCD@gmail.com or check out our webpage at www.HolmesS WCD.com.