Road Maintenance in Hilly Topography

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Grant,

First off, great job on your site! This is very good stuff. Now onto the deer management side, I’ve got a 360 acre piece in western KY and it is HILLY. I’d love to see you do a piece on road construction to avoid erosion. Our initial dozer work was needed to get into the property, but in hindsight it would’ve been much better to hire “smart” dozer operators who understood road building. We’ve brought in many, many trucks of gravel on main segments, but nonetheless we’ve got lots of erosion and I’m headed out with a team of 15 guys in a few months to repair (and hopefully fix) the roads correctly for the long term. I’d love to see you do a piece on this.

Jeff

Jeff,

Thanks for the kind words!! We just filmed a brief segment about road maintenance to be shown on the Pursuit Channel. I don’t know when that will air. I hope to do a more detailed segment on road construction and maintenance on GrowingDeer.tv. However, every episode of GrowingDeer.tv is literally what we are doing that week. It will be summer before we do any road maintenance at The Proving Grounds. In the meantime, I suggest you learn about broad-based dips. They are my favorite road maintenance tool in hilly topography! Ditches, and other common road maintenance designs, rarely work as planned unless maintenance is very frequent. This is because ditches become clogged with debris and force the water over the road, causing erosion. The best road maintenance plan is to limit the amount of water and the speed at which water passes over dirt/gravel roads. Water control is outstanding road maintenance.

Growing Deer (and managing properties) together,

Grant