Cost of draining grazing land

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Patchworkpony

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Does anyone have experience of getting a drainage company in to drain wet paddocks? If so what sort of price per acre did it cost and did it work? Any info gratefully received as we keep looking at property to buy with very wet land and wondered if it could be drained successfully
 
I had some land drains put under a 5 acre part of my land a few years ago, got a local contractor to do it. I was relatively lucky because there had been old drains there in the past, and there is a deep ditch along one side, so there was somewhere to drain TO. They did a "Y" shape at one end, then a straight line across the rest. Still cost me £750, (the pipe is expensive and we needed several tonnes of gravel) and with new drainage you don't begin to see any benefit for three years or more, while the water finds it's own way into the pipes. Worth it now - I lost a hay crop one year because the machinery couldn't get onto the land (after it was mowed, of course :() and it is now so much better.
 
Depending on the soil type you could look at mole draining it, as above you'll need a ditch for it to drain into (and for that fo go somewhere) and you'll need to take down any fencing so the 'mole' can go right into the ditch. It only lasts 2/4 years but much less disrupive to your land than digging lots of it up to lay pipes.
We're on heavy clay and have improved the drainage a lot over the years but this year I'm still very grateful we've only got the 2 on 12 acres (it would be a mud pit with anymore) so I'd certainly think very hard about taking on wet land again and more of a consideration than drainage would be stocking density. If you can rest land properly for six months at a time it can recover - if you need to use it all the time no amount of drainage will really help.
 
We are farmers and have had a quote of £700 per acre to do proper drainage (using modern materials not old clay pipes) this year on some of our arable fields. We think we will go ahead on a couple of our worst fields then do the grazing another year. The neighbouring farmer had some of his done 2 years ago and in this very wet year you can really see the difference and these fields are some of the very few locally without standing water on. However there does still have to be somewhere for the water to go and its no good when the water table is ridiculously high and the ditches are all full to overflowing lets just pray that we don't get another year like this anytime soon.
 
I am having a french drain installed this week, plus an old mole drain replaced with a new pipe to a new soak away. All in about £3000.
 
I've no idea on cost but our land has 1930s land drains made from brick all across it (we only found them when digging out our arena base). It's really interesting to see as our fields are unbelievably dry compared to others in our area. All the other fields on our road are very wet as water naturally runs down from the Hog's Back but with the drainage our fields have always drained within hours of torrential rain. We also have a clean water ditch running along two sides of our land that the water drains into. Seeing what a difference the drains make would make me more likely to put drains in if I ever had wet fields, it would be well worth the costs mentioned above.
 
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