Off-Grid Essentials: Tractor Gear for Dome Construction!

In this episode of Occupy the Land, we dive into the heavy equipment that powers our 18-acre desert homestead! We showcase our tractor attachments—back blade, auger, and mixing bucket—and demonstrate how we use them to build roads, manage moon dust, and prep for monsoon water capture with our sand pond. From hauling 150-200 loads of sand and gravel with our dump trailer to leveling the dome’s foundation and footers, join us as we detail the tools and techniques that make our off-grid dome build possible in the Arizona desert!

Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the land.org. What we’re going to be doing in this video is detailing all of the main heavy equipment and implements for the tractor, the attachments that go on the tractor, what they’re used for. How we’re able to do what we’re doing because it’s just Donna and I, and 18 acres is a lot of infrastructure to be doing.

Now, we spent the last year getting ready to get to where we are now. Now, you see behind us over there. We finally got the the foundation, the footers and the concrete floor ready. So things are going to start happening fast. But there’s a lot of other things that we’re doing to capture the monsoon water. Having our, sand pond out here where we’re going to be accumulating it, how we’re doing the drainage to make the roads, because the roads, the desert here is just desert, and it’s in your floodplain and it’s about, we call it moon dust.

Once you break the surface, even though there’s a lot of sand and gravel in there, it’ll just go right down to the axles. I mean, you know, it’s just. And you get stuck all the time. So it took months of me getting rivers, washed sand, clearing the roads, doing all that gravel and sand that I know where it’s at.

And so on. We’re going to be showing you different grades of it over here and how we’re hauling it. So that was the first thing we needed the tractor to scoop it up. We needed to be able to plant it, level it with the, back drag or a box blade that we put on the back. And it has rippers and top until all that kind of stuff, we’ll be demonstrating that.

And then a lot of it is just being able to move it. It took 150, 200 loads of, sand and gravel with this dump trailer to put on all of the roads and driveways and everything that we got and the roads you get here, miles of it. You build the roads and you. That’s how it works. So we’re going to show you the equipment that we have done.

I think the minimum amount that you need to be able to do what we’ve done. So it’s a lot. So we’re going to show you this because we’ve been getting a lot of inquiries. Well what’s this and how is that working. So we’re going to give you a little bit of a close up of it. And that’s what this episode is about.

Now this trailer, this right here is, the mechanism that opens the back bottom of the gate. Let me show you over here how it works. Right here. Okay. Take this off, pull this out and come back up and these gates open. So we haul a bunch of stuff. Donald does trash, takes it to the dump. We have, water tanks that we do.

Fuel tanks, sandy grout, whatever that we need to, distribute or haul around. This is very convenient. And it dumps and I’ll be showing you that right now, the general way to be used for moving around the, soil on the land and spreading it on the drives, is this when you release this, the bottom comes out and you can make it whatever length or how much opening you want.

And this is about, you know, right. There’s probably the maximum. We usually probably do it even less. You know it. We can judge it right here by how much we want to cut out. Then just kind of hang it here. Now look back in here when we bring this up, it’ll start. This will be full of sand and gravel and it just starts spreading it out wherever we need it.

And that’s how we’re able to travel around. Have deliveries of big 18 Wheeler trailers, have our shipping container delivered, and so on, is because we’ve done this to the road over here, you’ll see three different types of soil that we have for various different things just happen to have this piled up. Now this pile over here, there’s regular soil just, you know, off the land in the floodplain.

Now, going back up. When I do this, you’ll see there’s a lot of dirt in there. If we have a good breeze, a lot of times I can just lift it up with the bucket on the tractor, and the wind just blows away the, clay and silt, and it just leaves the sand and gravel. Now, over here.

Is the sand and gravel. It’s already pretty much done. There is no soil in it. It’s just sand and gravel. And we know where this accumulates here in the desert in different washes. And I got this to work with. I don’t have to do anything to it. That’s for concrete. We just add Portland to it and, water and boom, we’re making floors and walls and whatever we need.

Two fences, covering check dams or whatever. With this. Now, this is from the bottom of the river bed, the main river bed at the low part in this valley. And this is just really fine mortar sand. And it’s already separated. You know, nature has done it for me. So we just make really good mortar, you know, out of this.

And it’s almost already separated. Now, this is why I wanted to I have this particular place we looked all over for us to have a lot of the combination of what we wanted. Now we’re going to show you all the implements that go onto the tractor and some experimentation, and we’ll cut it up to where you can see why we have the attachments that we do what we’re doing with it.

Okay, now you can see that this is the low part of the property that set the far northeast corner. And this is where the sand dam is going. Imagine this is all going to be emptied out and the soil used for different things. And we have a trommel that we’ve prototyped, and now we’re building a new one that will be able to separate the soil and the fine sand wash sand, gravel, you know, and and big rocks.

But we don’t have big rocks, you know, that’s one thing. When we are where we are here now, this alluvial floodplain, all the rocks are probably got a good mile from us, you know, to the south west. So we have rocks that we can go get, but, we don’t have to worry about it a lot of times, you know, you going to come in?

I wish I had some rocks, you know? But, we don’t really need them and we don’t have them, so that’s good. But you can see. Go and take a look over here. You can see how much wetter that is, just even, you know, a foot below the surface. And it hasn’t rained for weeks. And, this is where it all eventually accumulates.

And it makes a little pond here that we’ve created. And now imagine that being an acre for every acre foot, you get 326,000 gallons. So that turns out to, you know, 600 and, 52, you know, so you gotta do math. So, 652 gallons of water that would be here, we could use for everything. So we’re not in a big giant hurry to do a well yet, because we want to see how we can do this.

And you can line it with, you know, bentonite, you know, clay that kind of hold it or even pond liners or. But we’ll get to that when we get to that.

What we’re doing now is, it’s got a good demonstration of where we’re taking the soil. What? We’re putting it. The reason is, is because the water comes this way. There is a wash right over there. There’s another wash on the other side of the housing site. So this berm that we’re doing here is going about that high all around this row.

And then we have to check the them and where the washers come over. So that retains all the water on the side of our property here. Now we can do an orchard. That’s what we’re going to be doing. A lot of the tree planting. Now over here is where the home site is your initial home site. This is the home site here.

And we’re just taking that soil and building this up so that when it floods, it goes around it. Now, what I’m going to be doing is taking the back blade on the tractor and show you how you can top and tilt and kind of, you know, craft it and then we’ll compact it. And, you know, it’s going to be a thing that we start now because, you know, as soon as we can get to it, hopefully this year we’ll start with the, slabs and foundations and footers and so on for the main home bill.

Now, what happened is this clogged up with these big dirt clods. You know, these are dirt, you know, but it got wet, so it just came up, you know, as clods. Well that’s good. You know, I’m like, okay, so we got, you know, soil. I can compact this. And that’s the moisture. This is what I’m talking about. This moisture in this soil, if I can auger this in, back up the water and it penetrate into it, it’ll hold all that water for trees.

Now, later today, what we’re going to do is go ahead and put the auger on. That’s right. Do this. We’ll put the auger on to the tractor and then the mixing bucket on it. And we’re going to scoop up a bunch of that sand and gravel. And then you’re going to see we’re going to auger a hole. Then we’re going to back up, fill it with sand, auger a hole back up, fill it with sand.

The reason is, is before I did, it was so dry that it just boom, dust just kind of went in. It was good demonstration. But now that I see that it’s, the soil is, you know, got some moisture down there, we’re going to do the same holes that we had, and hopefully it’ll just bring it out.

It won’t just fall back in, fill it with sand. You open to the top all that water that we create, this little, you know, six eight inch lake or whatever around here. We’ll just go in and saturate all the soil as opposed to just, you know, sheeting and going off into the washes and off the land. So anything that’s extra and you get a monsoon, you get extra, I guarantee it.

That extra is going into the sand pond. So we have a plan. I’m going to show you how we’re doing it.

Okay, now, these are rippers. Now, what happens is we’re just out for the day and everything. The hydraulics just slowly goes down. And eventually, as I’m using it, if I back up a little bit, would you use this back blade back here to kind of push it up around, scrape it smooth and so on? If I back up and this is down, you know, busses, pens and so on.

So I put this chain wire there so that it only goes down so I don’t have to worry about it. That’s why that’s there. But when I need to rip stuff from, I need to break out, the creosote and piles of soil that I move in or something. These come in handy, but I don’t use these that much, so I just kind of chain them so they stay up.

Now the blade going, come back here and show it this way. What happens? I can bring this down and I can tilt it down this way. So this drags on this end so you can compact the soil. I can tilt it up this way so that grips it, and it rip it up. Grabs the soil on the inside, and I can level it out.

I can tilt it this way or that way. So it’s a top and tilt. Now that’s, you know, all this posing mechanism had them Add and everything so I could do that. And you’re going to see now this is what I’m going to do.

What I’m going to do is this pad where the home goes. I need to keep building it up, but I want it kind of sloped all around the edges so that any rain that comes on that we don’t capture, we’re gonna have some rain capture. It’s going to go off the edge of the, the platform that we build for putting in the footers and the foundation and that kind of stuff.

So it goes off into that wash and that wash. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to come over here. If you look at this, you’ll see it’s kind of tilted to the left a little bit. And they I have controls in the cab that allow me to do this. And they do it a little bit more.

So I’m going to go around the outside and have it tilted a little bit. Then I’ll come back around and level it, put it level and have it leveled and leveled out. Those piles that we have over there. So I’m just going to we’re going to put it on Hyperlapse, do it real quick so you can see what’s up and why I needed this top and tilt back.

What we’re going to do. That kind of leveled it out and, we just keep building it up. I would normally I would put, you know, on all days worth, load on here and then do it. But I just wanted to show you one of the important things is this. When I tilt this back, this pressure zip, and it kind of compacts.

But we’ll do that like a day or two after a rain or even a light rain. The weather determines a lot of what we do. And I’m going to do. She’s just going to show you when I take off, I tilt it back how it levels. It compacts it down, just so you see. But normally we do this when it’s moist.

Here’s where the low spot is going to be on the sand dam. Now, it’s been a long time since it rained and it’s really dry. But this is the low spot. You you slow down the water, you stop it and accumulates. And it does this. So I just wanted to do a test. All green. Well, before I took it off.

And, here you can see that it gets really moist, really deep. And then what we do is we take and put sand in here so that it stays open. And when you have the water is accumulated on the top, it penetrates instead of running off into the washes and off the land. So that’s kind of the plan.

But you got to wait until the right time to do it. Pace.

Well, the augur make short work of making holes, and we are going to be doing our fence with these railroad ties here. They’re eight feet long, and it’s going to make a mast for our outer net mesh network, because that antenna that’s on top of the bus over there is Every time I walk around, because we’re going 15 miles all the way to that mountain, way over there.

So when you walk around, it kind of moves and it messes up the signal. So if we’re going to go in that far, we’ve got to have a stable, mast here. So we just auger in the hole and I mix up some concrete, wet this down, put some dirt, some, Portland in there. Boom. And this thing is going to be stable.

So that’s what we’re doing with this. And then we’ll mount that and show you again what the, mesh network does. But it’s always good to have a tractor and an auger.

Okay. Now what we got is we’re down and it’s like 12.5ft to the top of that. And then of course, you’re like 2 or 3ft above. And if you get a platform or something. So we can probably work 14ft or so. So that’s, that’s pretty good. You know, we have the center of a, the radius of a 30ft dome is 15ft.

So if it’s sitting on the ground, we got plenty of room 15.5ft that we can do. So this this will work. But, if we’re putting it on a pony wall and raising it up, we might have to put, you know, a little step stool in there or something. But this is probably what we’re going to work with.

So this is a good idea going back up. And you can kind of see what it looks like.

https://rumble.com/v6xnerk-off-grid-essentials-tractor-gear-for-dome-construction.html

https://www.bitchute.com/video/ud30jTq0pujT

https://www.brighteon.com/60eabee7-8938-45f2-9d38-3d504b7aa22f