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For many farmers, the biggest obstacle to planting isn’t weather or prices …it’s rock.
Across the country, large rocks buried in farm fields damage equipment, slow planting, and reduce yields. Farmers say hitting just one boulder can mean thousands of dollars in repairs and hours of lost work during critical planting windows. Traditionally, removing rocks has meant backbreaking labor or expensive excavation that disrupts valuable topsoil.
“The age old problem of rocks and fields that cause equipment damage, downtime, anywhere that you tell soil you’re going to have rocks in the farm farming regions of the United States. It’s never a fun job. Everybody did it as a youth. Still doing it now,” says Mason Kleitsch with TerraClear who talks about new technology that is changing that.
Kleitsch continues, “We have hired high resolution photography that flies the field, finds all the rocks, goes into an AI program, and creates an app that has the map of your field with all the rocks. Then it optimizes the path to go pick them up, which saves fuel, saves time, saves everything. You can sort it by size, you know, tailor made it to each farm. If the field conditions allow, we’ll send them out.”
Companies like TerraClear have developed machines designed specifically to break up and remove large rocks directly from the field. Using hydraulic power, the equipment fractures boulders underground, allowing farmers to clear land without digging it up or hauling tons of material away.
“They’ll bring a track skid loader with our attachment. They will go out. They will follow their path, pick up the rocks, and then they will pile them wherever the farmer wants us to pile them, usually off on a fence line or a corner of the field.
Growers who’ve adopted the technology say it saves time, reduces long-term equipment damage, and makes once-unusable land productive again.
As pressure grows to farm more efficiently and sustainably, innovations like these are helping farmers turn rocky ground into workable soil… one stone at a time.