# Ruts in Virgin Pasture from Land application of Oil Based Mud



## crbearden (Nov 15, 2009)

I have a 80 acre virgin pasture in Central Oklahoma. It still has the Buffalo Wallows in it. An oil well was drilled on another pasture (mine) and I allowed the land application of the drillign mud. I had experienced this with water based mud on some farm ground a few years ago and it was not a bad situation. I had to disk some land several times to break up the mud, but the next year the yields were much better than historically.

This field now has ruts nearly 1ft deep from the spreader truck and driving it over wet ground. Tilling the field and smoothing it up is not practical as it is an 8 to 10% slope on this hillside. Erosion would be terrible. We now experience monsoon rains instead of just an inch or two in a few hours. I don't know what is cousing that, but I have had to resow several fields over the past 3 years. How can we get the ruts out of the field? I am looking at getting a scraper and bringing material in to fill the ruts smooth it with a soil mover and then over seed with oats. I ned to do something quick...

If I had known this company was going to do such a sloppy job I would have had my attorney look at the contract and modify it. Their employees stole us blind including stealing our windmill and several pieces of antique horsedrawn farm equipment...


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## siscofarms (Nov 23, 2010)

Are there one set of ruts in the field or we talking ruts every 40ft or whatever ? How wide of ruts ? And hopefully going across the hillside and not up and down them ?


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## crbearden (Nov 15, 2009)

Sorry to take so long in responding. I have nto settled with the company yet as we are still trying to repair the damage. The ruts were about every 8 ft. if you go across them in a 4 wheeler, you get thrown off. The ruts are going down hill, across the hill, every which way. Another pasture that was an old cultivated and terraced field that was "laid out"in the 60's to get native blue stem to come back, and still not really covered. they covered this field with oil based mud 6 inches deep supposedly mixed with gypsum but they drug it with a flex time harrow and a I beam to where I had a 15 acre asphalt parking lot. I have some pictures. A short video of tyring to drive across the ruts. Oil company dut 6000 yards of fill out of a slope on the side of the well pad and hauled it ot to where we could fill in the ruts. The trucks made some ruts also. We then mixed the fill with chicken litter to get it to grow something. Had to wait for a bunch of [email protected]%&^$ permits from the state to apply the chicken litter. We are over 150 miles from the phosphorous area!!! Due to the permits and the rain it was 5 weeks before we could apply the litter. I should have had the contract looked over by my attorney. The guy was pressuring me to sign. We did this on another property several years ago and the only problem was cattle in the pasture. No cattle on this place. However, the earlier experience was on plowed ground. We did not experience the rut problem there....


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