County coverage
Ponds and Hillside Dirt Work in Bracken County, Kentucky
Bracken County has no interstate. We run east on KY 22 through Pendleton County and Butler, about 45 miles from our shop in Crittenden, and once we cross the line the AA Highway is the only road in the county on the state primary system. Everything else, from Brooksville out to Augusta, Germantown, and Foster, is two lanes and farm lane. When every load of stone comes in over secondary roads, owning the trucks stops being a detail.
The ground here is Eden shale hillside, not the ridgetop clay we regrade in Kenton or the subdivision fill in Boone. About three quarters of the county is Eden soil, and better than 60 percent of the whole county sits on slopes of 20 percent or steeper, with soft shale two or three feet down. Brooksville is up at 954 feet and the river at Augusta is around 455, so almost every job site out here is on a side slope. A basement usually means rock, and a pond usually means the only dependable stock water on the place.
Not much new gets built out here. Barely 340 homes have gone up countywide since 2010, and close to three in ten housing units are manufactured, so the everyday residential job is a pad, a gravel drive, and a culvert on somebody's acreage. The rest is farm work. There are 557 farms covering roughly 70 percent of the county, more cattle than people, and growers shifting off tobacco toward hay and beef, which puts brush back into pasture and takes old barns out of service. That's clearing, ponds, lanes, and stone, and it all rides in on our own trucks.
In demand around the county
Every service travels. See land development and production work, or call 859-910-9272.
Bracken County questions
Why do so many Bracken County farms need a pond?
Because the ground won't give up much water on its own. The shale and limestone under these hills measure their water by the gallon per day, while the Ohio River bottoms measure it by the gallon per minute, and almost none of the farm ground is down on the bottoms. Bracken County carries more than 12,000 head of cattle on close to 28,000 acres of pasture, so a pond is the practical stock water. Eden and Lowell soils are clay heavy and slow draining, which is good material for holding water, but fractured rock can leak. Picking and keying the site is most of the job.
How far is Bracken County from your shop in Crittenden?
About 45 miles, a little over an hour. We run east on KY 22 through Pendleton County and Butler, then into Bracken. None of that trip touches the interstate, which is exactly why hauling with our own trucks matters here instead of waiting on somebody else's schedule.
Can you dig a basement or footers in Bracken County shale?
Yes, and we plan for rock from the first walk of the site. Under most Bracken ground the soft shale sits 20 to 40 inches down, so a footer trench, a utility trench, or a basement hits it in the first two or three feet. Kentucky's geologists call this difficult excavation and they aren't wrong, but it's the kind of digging our excavators and dozers are built for.
Why do cut slopes and farm lanes in Bracken County wash out?
The shale. It breaks down fast once air and water get at it, and it slumps when it's wet, which is why the Eden and Lowell soils covering most of the county are mapped as eroded. On a 25 percent slope, an open cut left through a Kentucky winter doesn't stay where you put it. We stabilize as we go with rip rap, silt fence, and seed and straw, so healing the ground is part of the job instead of next spring's problem.
Working on something in Bracken?
We're minutes up the interstate. Tell us what the ground needs and we'll come look at it.