I had no experience with this kind of machine and it was a learning experience. After a couple of weeks of bouncing around and not moving much dirt I started to get the hang of it, but the pace was way too slow I would never complete the work before the rains came and the land had to settle over winter before planting could occur. My problem was the hardpan was almost impossible to get thru for the machine working in a single trench. By now I had trained three of our teenagers to help operate the machine. They helped grudgingly and we worked late into the night with lights.

Still the progress was too slow, I decided we needed the help of a large CAT with a ripper to clear the way for the excavator.

In the early excavating, in August of 1997, it was nothing but hot dirty and dusty soil I was turning until I broke thru the hardpan layer then suddenly out came this beautiful sand that was so moist it would stick together in your hand. This meant the hardpan was acting as a cap that maintained soil moisture beneath it. The hardpan was impervious so the deep soil moisture could not escape. This was a revelation. I decided to break tradition and I would only rip with one shank having the CAT follow marked lines where the center of each row would be. I would not cross rip because I want to retain the cap on deep soil moisture between the rows. My theory was that we would drip irrigate along the row that would maintain moisture in the 3 foot wide trench where we opened and totally mixed the soil so moisture would not escape there and let the hardpan seal the middles. The plants hopefully would tap deep moisture under the hardpan to reduce the overall amount of water that I would add through irrigation in later years.

The project seemed never ending. The field seemed to go on forever, most days I could only excavate 2 to 3 rows per day.

The trenches are 3 feet wide and over 5 feet deep. I would dig a hole in front of the excavator placing the dirt from the hole near the machine into the open hole left by prior digging. Then I would move along and do this again. Gradually all the soil is turned and mixed in the entire soil profile and thousands of mounds of dirt about 4 feet high remain. Over a two year period, we would place over 1,200 hours on the excavator, it was our work horse. I installed all the irrigation lines with it, and used it to push in all the steel stakes for each plant, over 18,000 of them.

In the El-Nino spring of 1998, I kept the excavator in the field to pull the tractor out of the mud as I tried to prepare the field for planting. On several occasions I buried the tracks completely in mud and this wonderful machine and I always managed to get out of the mess. These machines operate incredibly quietly and I developed a real enjoyment in operating this machine, listening to my favorite talk radio station and long since not having to think about how to move a control to get the machine to do what I wanted. The machine truly began to operate and feel like an extension of my body not a separate entity. This is a feeling that I first experienced after a year or so as pilot of a crop dusting aircraft years earlier. I don't know how many people experience this but to me it seems almost like a super human experience, our bodies are given super human capabilities by merging mentally with the operation of the machine. When there was no more work for this unbelievably reliable machine I reluctantly sold it for only a few thousand dollars less than my initial purchase price.