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Been avoiding talking about gophers..

L

LorenC

Member
cause it gets me so uptight.
The field I do for a friend has quite a problem. Gooobs of lost time clearing the cycle bar, goobs of lost fuel, I'm so angry I could spit fire by the time I'm done cutting. Yet, in the reading through the threads here I've never noticed others having the same issue, at least with the intensity that I feel about it. Can this be pretty much a local problem(western Oregon) or do the cycle MoCo's not have issues with it? My old swather was having problems with it but I didn't realize where the problem came from till that blew up and I was relegated to the cyclebar mower.
 
Thirty years ago Dad had a problem with pocket gophers and the windrower guy saying he wasn't coming back. Found a local trapper that was good enough to show my brother and myself how to trap them using a Cinch brand trap, simple tin plate with wire/small rod mechanism. Using a small screwdriver but long pushing through the dirt mound to find the hole and digging out with a garden trowel. First year he was there caught 2-300 on two 40 acre parcels. chris
 
Disc mowers dont have near the problems with gopher mounds. Any sickle type mower will have problems. Easiest way to get rid of them is anhydrous ammonia if you are ever going to plant corn.
 
Just wait till you get the fire ants and not only will your machinery suffer, you will too.
Just lay down to clean out a clog and next thing you know you are getting eaten up.
Richard
 
(quoted from post at 12:48:46 04/29/12) Disc mowers dont have near the problems with gopher mounds. Any sickle type mower will have problems. Easiest way to get rid of them is anhydrous ammonia if you are ever going to plant corn.
Click to expand...
"Disc mowers dont have near the problems with gopher mounds. Any sickle type mower will have problems."

That depends on where you are from, John. Here, the problem with disc mowers is more expensive that with sickles types, by far! We have sandy loam, with quarter to half-dollar stones in it. Gophers push stones up, disc launch them at 200MPH into $500 to >$1000 cab windows. On one occasion I saw all windows plus the windshield knocked out of a nice Kubota in a single field. Got John Deere glass in my fields right now.
 

Don't have gophers in SC AFIK yet, but some groundhogs seem to be drifting out of the NC mountains and are on the side of the interstste in a bank covered with Kudzu about 20 miles from me. We have fire ants. A disc mower will explode a fire ant mound, probably a gopher mound also. A disc mower is many times faster than a sickle bar mower, at least the ones I had. Now if the mower would just run off deer, coyotes, and Canada geese.

KEH
 
I know wat you mean. Make up a riggen on a old tracor or gas engine exhaust so the exhast gas can be directed direcrly into the borrow hole.Use flexible xhaust pipe and exhaust pipe do not try and use rubber hose as it wili burn. It will take no time at all till the field will be clear of gophers.
 
We have them here on a few fields. I have a gopher bait applicator that looks like a subsoil plow with a tube that runs down the back of the shank. Then there is a Gandy insecticide applicator that is ground driven. It drops the bait down the tube. The subsoiler has a mole ball that creates a new run/tunnel with the bait in it. The gophers find it and eat it. It takes a few years to get them under control. The bait is about $30 a bucket. I can treat about 50-60 acres per bucket.

I have them under control on my ground but the neighbors don't so I do the edges of the fields closest to the neighbors every other year.


I found a picture of a more modern plow/applicator. Mine started out as a snap coupler unit. I made the three point hitch for it. I would bet that it is 40-50 years old.
a69407.jpg

Article for gopher control University of CA.Paul Vossen
 
Gophers aren't the problem here, but ground moles are. If it was just my back yard, I could treat with insecticide, but this is 50 acres of hayland. Their mounds often have stones oushed up in them which plays havoc with sicklebar mower. Can't see them in the hay you're cutting.
 
We use an Elston Gopher Getter that looks a lot like JDSeller's pic. It took a couple of years, but it sure improved the gopher situation. They can get pretty bad in hay ground here in SW Iowa. Crop rotation didn't seem to help much. Father of a friend used a long hose with valved pipe nozzle hooked up to his almost empty anhydrous tanks after fertilizing. He jammed the pipe in the mound and injected the anhy. I never watched it myself, but he said it worked.
 
> We have sandy loam, with quarter to half-dollar stones in it.
> Gophers push stones up, disc launch them at 200MPH into $500 to >$1000 cab windows.

Heh, yeah, with rocky ground, you probably don't want to use a disc mower even if you don't have gophers :). The year my dad bought his first disc mower a neighbor hired him to cut corn stalks with it for round baling. His fields had more rocks in them than the gravel quarry. Luckily, we didn't lose any windows or kill anyone, but we learned a lesson about disc mowers and rocks. Probably took years off the mower's life.

The disc mower does eat (rock-free) gopher mounds for lunch though. I spent way too many hours of my life cleaning them out of the old sickle-bar haybines to ever go back to one.
 
Those gopher mounds will knock the edge off of a rotary mower also. When I was around 14 I got a job trapping gophers for a dairy. I got .75 cents a hour. That was the best money I ever made, back then. Sure beat .60 cents an hour hoeing weeds. Stan
 
You don't tell us where you are. My experience is with Richardson ground squirrels. We baited over a thousand acres two years ago first with a untreated prebait and the second time with treated oats applied by broadcast in very early spring. This worked extremely well as if not gopher free you will have to look pretty hard to find them. I am in nemt and the product used was around 8bucks an acre. Money well spent not sure if labeled for actual gophers or not.
 
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