Buried farm machinery

Occasionally there are pictures posted here and other places of modern big farm machinery buried up to at least the top of the tires or sometimes only the cab showing. Are those pictures real or made up somehow to get a few minutes of fame on the internet? I've stuck my old tractors more times than I will admit to and when it stops moving I know to quit trying. I get that anything can get stuck but it seems to me an operator would have to be awfully stupid to get buried down to only the cab showing. Seems like burying something that badly could result in a lot of damage to an expensive piece of machinery.

I believe part of the problem could be that new equipment with 4 wheel drive can take you through tough places that you would never expect to claw through. This pass season, I watched with amazement how a combine harvesting beans could cross a field leaving deep ruts that filled with water by the time the combine passed by again. But when these machines go down, they may as well be dropping through the ice on a frozen pond. I know of combines that have had their rear axles pulled off by a excavator that was pulling it backwards out of a hole. Tile drainage is much less expensive in the long run.

We used to have a neighbor that seemed to get stuck in every machine they got into. So I vote for real.

Like everyone else, we have been stuck. But here, there's a bottom. None of that going out of sight business! There are stories of when the NYS Thruway (I90) was built across the Montezuma swamp, heavy machinery went out of sight. I've heard that they never found a bottom, just kept dumping fill until it quit going down. Likewise I've heard of a farm tractor suffering the same fate in the same general area.

In the spring around here that's easier than you think. Most of the ones cab deep are on construction sites or fell in a hole dug and filled the year before. But in the spring I've been stuck in a frost heave and knowing the problem stopped right away, then when. I got back the tractor was sitting on its belly.

Saturated soils, especially sand can be solid and supportive for half a field length then liquify and become quick sand in the next 5 feet. My uncle had a field like that, there was a annual water drainage from a mile away through beach sand across and through a swampy area then across his field. The sand as 50 inches deep on top of a clay base. He hired a 18 year old non farm kid one summer. The kid was a good worker but had initiative where it was not needed. My uncle told him to put manure on the first 1/2 of that field, but not go past a fence row rock pile. He did. The Farmall H front wheels started into the soft (invisibly different) soil and began sinking. By the time the young man pushed in the clutch, the rear tires had made a half revolution spinning. He put it into reverse and the rear wheels went down immediately. It was now down 3 feet on both ends. He sat there for 30 seconds deciding what to do with the engine running. The engine vibration sank the tractor to the fan shroud in front and the platform in the rear with the manure spreader pretty much sunk on its front half. He was bright enough to reach into the slurry and pull the pin on the spreader. It was deeper than his whole arm, but sloppy. He used the tongue of the spreader and the side boards to get to solid ground. After retrieving the spreader, it took a F-400, a Super-H and a 350U cabled and chained to the tractor to pull it out. The kid spent the next 5 hours cleaning the sand out of the clutch housing and mechanisms. He learned to listen better after that. Jim

Not sure about some of them, but my Dad with Parkinson's tried to plow a field that had standing water around it in the fall one year on rented ground. He caught the ditch I had left from the UNI system picker and it pulled him in. By the time I got there the deck of the 766 was level with the ground and the ground was just at the freezing-slimy point. Took three tractors with chains on to pull him out-unhooked the plow and pulled it away from the tractor. Was a big mess as the back 18 inch wheels looked like solid round circles. The owner of the ground had a Case 310? crawler because he was used to getting stuck. Fields got tiled after we quit running that ground...

I'm with you. SOME stuff you see on the net has had to of been doctored up. But, I know things can be buried pretty deep also. You kind of got to be your own judge I guess. I look for other proof in the picture, such as other equipment, other tracks in the mud. For something to continue to go down that deep, usually entails being messed with further in efforts to get it out.

Neighbor's father swamped a JD 4650 4WD tractor pulling a field cultivator close to a wet spot. By the time he gave up boring around the bottom of the cab door was scraping the ground..

Three thoughts here:
When I saw your heading it made me think of the fast hitch carry all I dug out of the edge of the rock pile. Cleaning up last month on the place we bought 16 years ago. I hooked into the angle frame and planks and by the time I was done I had the whole frame with the fast hitch teeth.

The farm I grew up on had many springs. In the right years we could work ground deep into low spots and get stuck on the side hill. Not just stuck, but fall in stuck. Now with bigger equipment there is bigger stuck.

Years back before da MeTube there was a local farmer who had some old JD sheet metal. He cut an old rear tractor tire in half and painted some card board yellow. He set the sheet metal and tires w/ the painted card board a ways off the road so it appeared he dropped in. To sell the ploy he parked the old spreader about 10 feet behind w/ tongue on the ground. He quickly became the talk of the coffee shop. The next week the local small town paper had a picture with a short explanation and then the joke was on the coffee clutch.

A few years back, the gas company was laying a pipe through my farm. I warned them, for one section through a peat filled hollow, that if they took their JCB 3C wheeled machine in there, they would lose it! Of course they didn't listen, and when I came back half an hour later, there it was, sunk up to the top of the rear wheels, and level with the bonnet (hood). Took them the rest of the day to fish it out with a tracked machine on swamp mats! No made up show there, just stupidity!

I worked for an individual in the Florida panhandle back-filling block foundations, for houses, with sand. In one particular subdivision, the contractors had to dig out about 7 feet of swampland, and fill it in with sand and fill dirt.
We used a Case 450 loader and dozer. While doing one house, the dozer just sank in above the tracks, just sitting there, not in use. The land the houses were build on was not back-filled; just the house on top of the muck. Took us most of the day, using the C50 Chevrolet dump and the loader to retrieve it. No hard ground or trees to help out. Fun times. zuhnc

Well don't know about the rest of the world but sofar in my life time i have PLANTED A FEW and also been on the HARVESTING CREW getting them out . Now do you want and itemized list ranging back 65 years?????? With some being of top U/Tube quality but happened when the only thing normal people had to shot pictures were like a Brownie camera . With working excavating , oil field, and coal hauling , Farming Yea we have seen STUFF PLANTED . Here in Ohio spring field work ya got to have atleast ONE big time stuck and also late fall harvest ya got to have one to finish out the year . Back in the Clinton formation play when we were drilling like mad men and almost a drilling rig on ever corner of ever road and goat path we were not building mega locations it was blow them in as fast as you could and only put down stone on the first 150 feet of the lease entrance and cut a one blade width wide down to the yellow back to the pad cut three pits and on to the next one , we had some real wild STUCKS , Construction Oh yea, ya play in dirt your going to get stuck. Farming on this one my one stuck and troubled was in 1989 , tis was the granddaddy of them all . It was my second year on a rented farm and i was adding a new 8 acre field , it was part of and old pasture and it sat next to the one huge strip mine spoil pile and behind the old barn . had one squall that i was going to leave with grass . I had walked just about every inch of this field looking it over and layen out a game plan and marking boundary . So i started plowing it turning it out and it was rolling real nice , the tractor was a 67 706 Gas narrow ft real good 18.4x34's tires loaded with three sets of donuts on the land side and five weights on the furrow had a 1000 hanging on the ft as 750 sometimes would bring on the pucker factor going up hills and i really hated looking down the opening of the muffler when she was standing straight in the air , So you really had to watch for soft spots . this field sat high and dry even the squall was dry . I had made a lot of passes over the grass strip just fine , all but this round as the ft end hit the middle i raised the plows and when the back tires hit the center of it the ground opened up and the back end of the tractor went down , the 4 bottoms had the ft two bottoms down in the hole and the back two standing up out of the ground and the tail wheel was over 6 feet in the air . I had to step Up about a foot to get off the tractor . I only had one tractor at the time , all i had extra was my Ford F 250 4x4 , yea i tried that and never shook it , called a friend that had a 1086 he came down and we never shook it , went over to the neighbor farmer who i had never meet before and asked for help and he came with a 4840 and the 4840 and the 1086 hardly even shook it no matter how we tried and even added in the pick up with tire chains on all four . Well plan A, B,C, and D did not work out on to plan E . I went up to another friends place and borrowed one of his 750 Deere Dozers with a W6 F hyster winch , that is 60000lbs of straight line pull add in a snatch block and ya have 120000 lbs of line pull . I have pulled many drilling rigs that weighed in at 200000 lbs and trucks of all sizes and other stuck dozers , This 706 is coming out . The down side is getting the dozer in to the farm , can't come across the bride as it is a covered bridge a wooden covered bridge. can't bring the semi in the long way due to the other little bridge , so i have unload up on the other road then come down to almost the bridge then cut into the pasture and ford the creek with out getting the dozer stuck in the creek or the far bank . Get this all done and up to the tractor and hook straight line pull line out about fifty feet drop blade set brakes and start to pull , tractor no move but doer pulls back to tractor , i sucked 40000lbs of dozer back to the tractor , plan B line out set dozer in and pull so i line out around fifty feet sink the blade into the dirt as far as it will go and spin the tracks digging them down in and building up dirt behind , i had them down in to the top of the tracks and started my pull and sucked the dozer up out of the holes . New plan cut a trench a tee trench down about four feet then back the dozer down in the tee and add the snatch block , now something will either come or bleed . My one buddy Sid was helping me and Sid and i worked the patch together so he knew all the how to and what fors . we had some spectators watching all this That was the ticket and we got her coming and out . That nice job of plowing was now a total mess with all the holes that got dug from spinning all the plowed ground that got packed down and the HUGE almost bottomless hole in the water way . Sid and i worked three days filling that hole with the biggest rock we could put in the back of the old 65 ford one ton dump from back in the old strip cuts then load after load of shale that i was cutting off the old spoil banks with the 750 and sid was loading with a 990 David Brown loading the old ford like a Euclid with shale running off all four corners . Best we can figure was that either a bore hole or a old deep mine gave way as coal mining has been and ongoing this down here . That farm had a massive strip cut thru the middle that was done back in the early 60's , back then they mined for miles cutting thru township roads and everything . The back high wall on that farm was over a 175 feet to the water level and another 90 plus feet to the bottom . the old org cut was 900 feet wide . then they would auger what they did not strip back up under the hills . Up on the back of that farm was just a shade over 90 acres that was lightly over grown that had i stayed down there i was going to open up but needed to do a smalll back fill of the cut to get to it and do some bruch cleaning that i figured would take two weeks with a 750 of building a easy accesses that you did not have to go four wheeling on a dry day to get up there. . Then the granddaddy of oil field stuck was the drilling rig that had to pull off a hole that went down total weight of that rig was 210000 lbs of Stuck stuck like six feet deep from ft to back . On that one i was working for my one friend as the boss of all mobile equipment and field operations . When the cal came in for two dozers for a stuck rig i had two J D 850's setting and one operator BIG BUTCH , super Guy great operator BUT HUGE Ok yep i can send two Hey Butch load up and i will take the other off we go , haw how hard is this going to be between us straight line pull we have 140000 lbs pull plus we each have two snatch blocks . We will be in and out faster then it took to drive down . It was and hour and a half drive . When we got there there were two D 6 D's there already working with four pulling and pushing nothing moved only broken winch lines then in come two D 7 F's and two mechanics with new spools of 1 1/8 dia . winch line . then two more D 6 D's . We have seen the sun go down and we saw the sun come up and we pulled a brand new west Coast Dickerson setup Mack tractor double frame get pulled in half ( Butch and i did that ) as we were hooked to the ft. then Burdett Drilling brought in thee Huge Oshkosh all wheel drive with the 24 inch I beam frame and as the sun went down on the second day the rig was on the pavement . everything else was just momentarily delays.

As others have commented, soil type has a in role in this. Where I am at in East central ND, most of the ground is 12-18 inches of black topsoil over 1000 feet of white clay. When the white clay is wet it has the consistency of pudding. The black soil will support equipment, but if you break through, there is no bottom. It takes an operator with a lot of constitution to stop as soon as they realize there is a problem and not try to get themselves out. In wet years here, there are some farmers that will move a track hoe from field to field with the harvest crew. They know it will be needed, and less damage gets caused if the proper solution gets used right away.

Took me a while to get used to it. I moved here from somewhere you couldnt sink more than 12 inches. If you went that far, you hit the big rock and stopped.

I never actually saw all this, just heard the stories...

Back in the early 80's, one of my high school buddies was all into 4x4 monster trucks. His daddy had the money and supported the habit.

One day he decided to go mudding in the city nature center. Trespassing big time!

Of course he got stuck, called his brother, he got stuck, buddies, all together there were about 5 trucks buried to the frames.

So start bringing in daddy equipment... Excavator, 4x4 tractor, dozer, all now stuck in the showcase pristine swampland.

Now the cops are involved, lots of them! The brother was a known felon, outlaw biker with an attitude.

It was a rather costly adventure, having to pay the city hired extraction crew, landscape repair, fines, court fees...

I'm sure dad was proud!

I started laughing when I read Janicholson's reply. I too had a high school helper that I told not to go on the lower half of a corn field. So what does he do? Takes the NF 4010 with duals and the disk right across the very bottom of the field. And promptly gets stuck, though not that bad. I also had a retired farmer helping me that spring, plowing with the 966. Asked him to go pull out the 4010. He tells me later, I started moving, but then I stopped. I looked back, and John had the 4010 turning in reverse!.
Nothing staged there, just ignorance.

The local coop buried a sprayer with all four wheels completely below the surface of the field; only the cab was showing. I stumbled on it first hand; I called a friend to chuckle about it. He replied, I know, im going out there with my excavator now.

It took an excavator and at least one semi wrecker to get it out.

So it wasn't staged...

...had initiative where it was not needed.

That is a phrase I need to remember, it is a good one!

Ive been stuck pretty bad when I was younger.

To get stuck like some of the situations you mention, you need to be on disturbed ground, like a construction site with deep digging, then the loose ground gets saturated and the stuff on tracks sinks in out of sight.

My dirt is also topsoil on top of 120 feet of yellow and blue clay as someone else mentioned. The clay is often like pudding, so only the topsoil is holding you up. Its really easy to break through the topsoil and sink down to the frame. Its difficult to have enough traction left to get your frame worked through the topsoil and sink any deeper.

Not impossible, but difficult.

Paul

I watched a video once where they dug up a tractor in Europe somewhere that was completely buried. They restored it enough to get it running.

I buried a 4 wheel drive crab steer RT crane once so deep you had to step down into cab. It was like some kind of quick sand! The spot were I did this now stands a relatively large correctional facility. Parts of the building are experiencing structural problems.
Another time some 45 years ago I used to do some custom plowing, a lot of night work. So going along like a house afire when felt like the ground opened up underneath me. Had to leave it till morning. Turned out there was a spring in the middle of field that farmer forgot to tell me to go around. I just forget how deep it was in, but I remember a lot of shoveling to get the plow unhooked!
The best one of all was up in a little spot called Mead just outside of Hearst Ontario. We were tearing out a closed down sawmill and the lamebrained watchman we had hired decided to take a trip with a big cat loader down a winter only muskeg trail into the bush. He kept trying to get out with the bucket but it just kept sinking. Couple of the local guys that had some big equipment refused to go in and even try to get it out. He finally got a guy with a huge excavator and what he called lily pads that he kept moving along to go in and he did get him out in the end. When I asked the watchman what the heck he was thinking to drive loader in there claimed he was chasing a bear, but thats another story!

Back in 1980 i sent one of my best Cat skinners up to build a drilling location up in N/E Ohio just south of I 90 off st. rt 193 . The lowboy dropped him off and radioed back that he was on his way to North East Pa. to move the one dozer up there to the new location . I was setting in my office looking over the work for the night shift when i hear Unity 28 to base call . I hit the key on the mic and said what do you need Beaver and he comes back with I am stuck in a w. W Va. ascent . What do you mean your stuck Jerry just dropped you off . I am STUCk comes over the radio . OK I'll be up . One lowboy was in the yard and one 750 Deere . Beaver ran a D 6 D his favort . I called back in the shop and told the one mechanic to go check out unit 40 and fire up unit 15 and help me with the stinking ramps Those were made out of 4 1/2 inch drill collar . Loaded up and headed up north as the old shop was on 193 . I was on location in a half hour and yep Beaver was Stuck . Unloaded and sucked him out with out a problem . Ok fine your out i am going back to the shop . He went back to pushen dirt and i headed for the trailer . Since i was by myself now i had to do things different and back the dozer on then use the blade and chain to pull the ramps up . As i was backing on i had just broke over the beavertail when i saw him sink the D 6 and was stuck again . Back off the trailer and drag him out . He was just getting started stripping the top soil . Pulled him out again and he and i looked over the location . even when you went and walked on the clay it wiggled , this was in mid summer . Up in that area the water table is just 3-4 feet down . The one thing i learned early on in the oil patch was that the old 750 John Deere dozers would work and go where no D 6 d would go .So i put Beaver on the 750 and i stayed on the D 6 on solid ground just in case he went down . while i was there the field man showed up and he asked why we had two dozers on this location and i had to show him why . We talked about it and i told him that this ground would never support a rig a it was and that we could never dig the three pits . Beaver got the top soil off but that location was nasty . and before the rig came it was decided to put stone on every thing and to use tanks for the pits . I had three dump truck companys hauling stone for four days every tri axle and tandem they could come up with and the first time i put down fabric to build a floating pad on top of four feet of stone covering a 300 x 400 foot area plus the 1500 feet of lease road Can we say CHA CHING just to poke a 5000 ft hole in the ground . From St Rt 5and 87 north to the lake plum nasty ground over to the ohio Pa line . Then ya have abiout the same ground conditions from St. Rt 534 north of US 224 up above the Ohio Pike and west to St > Rt 183 Swamp pads help . Driller knew that they would be usen at times 200 Ft of conductor pipe before they got it set in rock . They also knew that at any time from 200 feet or less they just might hit a pocket of surface gas down to 880 feet as several rigs went up in a huge ball of fire . The first company i ran the well water coming out of the spikets could be lite with a match and burn like a gas stove. That well was 325 feet deep .

Stopping before the situation becomes completely hopeless is a lot like asking for directions,it just aint going to happen!

I own about 25 acres of low ground, and have buried a tractor or two in the spring planting season.As I have gotten older I tend to just wait to plant that last during a wet spring.My grandfather told me of how they lost a few cats to sink holes when he help build the Alaska hwy during the war.As a small kid I asked him what he remembered most about it. He said sink holes, cold weather and very big bears

It happens to the best of them.

My sinking feeling story is not so dramatic. We have a lake house, and in about 60 feet of shoreline we had sedge grass and reeds. My wife didn't like not seeing the shore, and asked me to brush hog a clearing. I only had an 8N with new back tires. I walked it first, through the grass and reeds, and didn't note anything to concerning.

I got hooked up, and spinning and took a small cut at it, no trouble, swung a circle and took another bite across the sedge and reeds. I figured, no problem, I'll knock this down in 30 min and be back watching football and drinking beer on the Barcalounger. So - I took bigger bite right down near the shore line.

It bogged, I clutched(8N live PTO) tractor stopped dead. Unshift the PTO drive, lift the brush hog, and that was the end of that. As soon as I started to move off, the rear wheels just headed for China. Stopped when the lower rims were shipping water, and I stepped off a very short drop down.

Four hours later, I'm covered in sand, mud and two trucks and 40 feet of chain, finally back on dry land. I learned the right way to do it. Face the house, back to the shore, brush hog up, and back into the reeds. Spin the brush hog, drop it on the reeds, and catch 1st gear quick. Then move over, back down, drop it and do it again, and again.