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Doug: You make a good point, these tiles must be maintained. Every time you see a bad spot it must be repaired. What you have described is really worse than no tile at all, as it acts just like springs throughout the field, with water lines feeding them. I rather doubt larger tractors are to blame for crushing tile unless someone was in there when it was just too wet. Trucks even light trucks do far more dammage than tractors. Any of the tractors from the 1950's are far heavier in pounds per square inch than a 300 hp articulated with duals. Tractors the size of the Farmall H or Cockshutt 30 will pull 3 times their own weight on a stone boat, on hard ground. Very few tractors will do that, none of the big ones will. It is simply because they just don't have the pounds per square inch of rubber on the ground. A single axle 60 series Chev truck with 5 ton on it, ( not a big load) will excert 5 times the pounds per square inch on the ground, that any tractor will. And what makes the truck even worse is the shape of it's tire. Thus the reason for grain buggies, floatation tires on wagons, manure spreaders, etc. I had close to 300,000 feet of tile on my farm, some of it plastic, some clay and some wooden box. And yes the wood box drains installed in the 1920's and 30's are still working. With that many feet of tile you are always on the lookout for breaks. They are very easy to spot at planting time. I banned all trucks from my fields excpting empty pickups and that reduced the problem to almost nil. Frost does a bit of dammage as well. You must also keep those small animal trap doors in place at the end of the pipe. Tile is a tool of profitable agriculture and regular maintainence must be done. You can not put tile in the ground and say it's good for a 100 years without looking.
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