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Connecting Pot Holes to Drains

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There are basically three approaches to improving surface drainage:

  1. Cut drains or ditches through your field from the lowest points to the outside with a continuously falling grade.
  2. Landform or shape the surface topography using cutting and filling to ensure every point on the field is falling towards the boundary.
  3. Mixture for 1 & 2.
While OptiSurface Designer can design for all of these, it really stands alone in 2 above. It is the only thing of its kind to date that calculates the optimized field topography that ensure continuous falling grade in multiple directions and balance cut/fill while minimising earthworks. You can define your minimum, maximum grade and a smoothing factor (and some other parameters if you want them) to achieve the result you want and how much earth you can afford to move. It is very different to laser grading which uses single planes (dual slope) which shift much more soil than required to achieve your water management objectives.

So back to the question, if you have drains through your field already but you still have many potholes pooling water, then you can use OptiSurface Designer to calculate the surface that will have some minor cutting and filling to get those potholes to drain to the drains through the field.

A few of the advantages of OptiSurface to just using method 1 above (cut drains or ditches) is that:
  • You potentially do half the earthworks as you are not just cutting and dumping, you are doing balanced cut and fill.
  • You have less steep sided drains that create problems for machinery traffic.
  • You have more uniform water infiltration and less weeds.


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