The final prove up requirement was to cultivate a portion of the land. We cut grass, flowers and weeds with a small 8N Ford tractor to start off. Every foot of open land available was used for prove up as with our small equipment it took lots of time to make a noticeable improvement.

We could not get the necessary 40 acres under cultivation without taking out some trees. In order to do this we had to use dynamite and blast the stumps out after the trees were removed by chainsaw. We made a prod which could be pushed under the stump with our small crawler, thereby making a hole for the explosive whereby we blasted it out.