Ditching & Farm Drainage in Rhodesdale, MD — Get Water Off Crop Ground

When You Need This

The ditch has silted in. It grew up in cattails and willow, the bottom filled with muck, and now it holds water instead of moving it. Water backs up out of the ditch onto crop ground, and the end rows drown out every wet spring. You are planting late, replanting, or driving around a wet corner all season.

Or a field crossing is the choke point. The pipe under the farm road is crushed, rusted out or too small, so it dams the ditch every time it rains hard. A field entrance was built up with no pipe under it at all and it cut the ditch in half.

This is the Eastern Shore in one sentence: the ground is dead flat, the water table is high, and much of the soil is clay that will not take water down. Everything depends on ditches, and near the Nanticoke, the Choptank and the Marshyhope the tide decides when those ditches can accept water. A ditch here is not drainage decoration. It is the only place the water has to go.

How Steve Does It

He walks the whole run, not just the wet spot, and shoots grade from the outlet back upstream. Nine times out of ten the problem is downstream of where the water is standing. Cleaning your section while the choke point sits below it moves the problem, so he finds the real bottleneck first and tells you where it is, even when it is not on your ground.

Then he sets the flow line and cleans the ditch to a steady fall with the 10-ton excavator, taking out the silt, the muck and the root mass and leaving a bottom that carries instead of a bottom with dips in it. He does not just dig deeper — a ditch deeper than its outlet is a long pond.

Banks get shaped to a slope that will stand up and that you can get a mower on. Steep, straight-cut banks in this soil slough back into the ditch in one season and you pay to clean it again. Where a bank is undercut or a bend takes the current hard, he lays riprap or shapes it out so the water is not chewing the same spot. Spoil gets pulled back off the edge and spread thin so it is not a berm that dams sheet flow off the field, or it goes where you want it.

Field crossings get pipe, sized off what the ditch actually carries and never smaller than the pipe above it. He beds it on stone, keeps the invert matched to the ditch flow line, backfills evenly in lifts on both sides so the pipe cannot deflect, and keeps enough cover over the top for loaded equipment. Ends get flared sections or a headwall, with riprap on the apron so the crossing does not undercut. He pulls out the old crushed pipe rather than leaving it in the fill.

Where there are outlets from field tile or a yard system, he sets them at the right height above the flow line with a grate so they do not run backward or plug with muck. Then the disturbed ground gets shaped, seeded and strawed so the new bank holds. He works around the crop calendar — this is dry-season and off-season work, and he plans it that way.

What It Costs in Rhodesdale

Linear feet of ditch, then how much material has to come out and how far it has to be moved or spread. How grown up it is, since willow and root mass are slower than silt. Where the spoil goes. Bank slope and length, and whether any riprap is needed. Number and size of crossings and the pipe, stone and end treatment for each. Whether an old pipe has to come out. Access along the run and how wet the ground is when you want it done. Then seed and straw on the banks.

Estimates are free. Steve will walk the ditch to the outlet with you first, because pricing the wrong section is money wasted.

Why Choose Marshy Hope

Steve Hackett owns the business and runs the machine. Fifteen years in the trade, six of them working for himself out of Rhodesdale. He carries a $1,000,000 general liability policy and will send the certificate to you or your builder before he starts. Estimates are free, and you hear back the same day or the next one. One crew handles it from dirt to concrete, so nothing gets dropped in the handoff.