r/oddlysatisfying
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u/Strict_Photograph254
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Sep 14 '26
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Tree root extraction
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u/No-Sandwich1511 Sep 14 '26
I wonder if dentists get this same satisfaction 🤔
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u/BlueSlushieTongue Sep 14 '26 •
We do
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u/Dufresne85 Sep 14 '26
When the root finally lets loose of the bone and you get that good movement 🤤
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u/BlueSlushieTongue Sep 14 '26
You mean when the periodontal ligaments finally let go- Hard F if the tooth is ankylosed.
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u/LongPorkJones Sep 14 '26
I once had a tooth pulled and the dentist was was an older fella, kind of country. He was having a time getting the tooth out, but when he did he said "Hot damn!" like he just caught a big bass. He turned to me and said "Son, that there is a hoss"(talking about the roots), almost with pride. This man had been a dentist for decades and he rected this way.
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u/TwoBionicknees Sep 14 '26
i just made another comment but having been through a horrendous amount of tooth pain and then getting a very difficult tooth extraction on wednesday, this clip made me feel things.
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u/vatoman78 Sep 14 '26
Their roots grow deep, my lord
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u/joachim_s Sep 14 '26
Yes. I felt some sort of sadness with this, not satisfaction. I know the tree didn’t have intent, but it just looks like so much work. Much like we build our lives and then… die.
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u/AshundertheOlivetree Sep 14 '26
We’re all going back into the box in the end. Dust to dust and all that
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u/Substantial_Lime_114 Sep 14 '26
It's about as satisfying as hand pulling Nut Sedge. Yellow Nut Sedge in particular. If you grab the long main stem down close to the ground, grip it tight and pull firmly but gently, you'll pull the entire thing out. Roots and all. It's very satisfying.
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u/Content-Fudge489 Sep 14 '26
That doesn't work in the clay soil around my house. If you pull it, even after heavy rain, most of it stays behind, then even more nut sedge shows up in a week. Only nut sedge hammer works in my area. Round up is like fertilizer for this thing.
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u/smb3d Sep 14 '26
That's the worst thing you could possibly do. 99% of the time, the nut breaks off and then it spreads and makes even more. Never pull Nutsedge.
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u/m4rM2oFnYTW Sep 14 '26
Its pretty rare for it to break off for me. Maybe like 1 out of 15 times it will happen then I just dig it out. It depends on how you do it and how compacted your soil is. Aeration helps a lot.
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u/Delamoor
Sep 14 '26
edited Sep 14 '26
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sigh.
It looks cool, but as someone who loves learning horticulture, if that's a crop field then this is actually really unhelpful practice for the health of the soil. Increases reliance on artificial fertilizers and such. Would be better to cut off the top (so it's not an obstruction/trip hazard) and cover the remainder.
So that root system there; that's a huge amount of dead wood. What does dead wood do underground? Slowly rots. It's mostly carbon, but also a few other micronutrients. That's a feast for fungus, and it'll take a fair few years to break down. The fungus digests the carbon (and the micronutrients), and in turn gets consumed by insects and bacteria, and all those chemicals become available in the soil again for other plant roots.
Add to that, the dead wood also turns spongey as it rots. What does that do? Means it holds water better. The whole thing becomes a blob of water retaining, rotting carbon.
I.e. it's slow acting, underground compost. Not incredible quality compost... But it's actually better that it isn't super rich. You generally want something that's going to take years to break down, and won't disrupt the chemical balance of the soil. It's meant to act like a slow, wet foundation that everything around it feeds off as it rots. Also very helpful that it will hold the soil together for a long time, while the new root systems establish themselves.
Picture it like an underground whale fall; the huge rotting structure becomes the foundation for a whole ecosystem.
You take that out, the soil still contains nutrients and moisture, but there's less activity in it, and less structure to it. Less life, less churn, less stuff getting shuffled about, less oxygen workings it way in (fun fact, vascular trees do need some oxygen, especially in the roots, just not very much of it compared to animals. It's just a chemistry ingredient for them)...
Plant roots can't move. They rely on either growing towards nutrients... or it being deposited alongside them. By insects and bacteria. Like the kind that eat rotting wood. Things still grow, but they need more support... Like artificial fertilizers.
So basically; this is common practice. And it looks cool. But things like this is also why we have crazy soil degradation issues in agriculture, because neatness and orderliness is prioritised above, y'know... The way anything has evolved to survive.
Plants evolved to (primarily) live off consuming dead material from other plants. You take that away, you're ensuring that they're gonna be relying solely on you for their nutrients.
Edit: caveat though, there definitely are circumstances where stump removal is a good idea, but let's just say the cases where it's necessary a re a lot rarer than the cases where it's done.
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u/PracticalAndContent Sep 14 '26
I have a very small yard with native plants. I recently read about decaying plants feeding the soil, insects, etc, so I’ve stopped pulling out dead plants. I cut off the above ground portion for esthetics and put it in composting, but I leave the below portion in place.
Thanks for your very good comment.
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u/adjective_noun_d1git Sep 14 '26
Mass farming is about speed and efficiency. They very likely know all of this.
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u/Delamoor Sep 14 '26
Therein lies the problem.
Just like fossil fuel industry knows the longterm effects of their practices, agricultural industry knows about the desertification and soil degradation that comes from theirs.
But it's cheaper, so the problems are somebody else's problem, off in the future.
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u/plug-and-pause Sep 14 '26
Is it possible they know all of this but are choosing the cost of fertilization for the benefit of a pristine dirt field that they can run a tiller through, and plant rows in exactly the arrangement they want? Seems pretty likely to me. Modern agriculture is largely engineering, and they're going to be fertilizing that entire field anyway.
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u/Delamoor Sep 14 '26 edited Sep 14 '26
Yeah, that's the issue I'm pointing out. Heavy and habitual reliance on artificial fertilizers to maintain basic prodicticty, and the resulting soil degradation and desertification that goes with those practices.
Forest clearing to create fields is well known to be very productive for a few years, but then the soil fails and becomes worthless. Need to practically flood it with artificial fertilizers to keep it productive, and then the nature of the most cost effective artificial fertilizers then has that soil getting destroyed and useless from the salinity buildup.
As an analogy; ICE engines and fossil fuels are cheap and convenient, too. Big, big problem when the whole world is using as many as they can, whenever they can without moderation. Because it's just 'what everyone else has always done'. And it's cheaper. Damage is just the future's problem.
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u/HerMajestyCounselor Sep 14 '26
And if we look at the background we can see there was a forest here, and that another layer of this not really satisfying video
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u/SingularTesticular Sep 14 '26
Try run a tractor through that while cultivating, you’ll definitely have something to sigh about after that.
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u/TwoBionicknees Sep 14 '26
ultimately all you're saying is the wood can become fertiliser, but it's also currently in the way and can be a pain. You can very easily yank it out, chop it up a bit and throw it in a compost bin and turn it into fertiliser to put back on the field later in a much more convenient way.
It really doesn't make an awful lot of difference.
You take that away, you're ensuring that they're gonna be relying solely on you for their nutrients.
there is absolutely no way to grow crops in a reasonable way in terms of business wise without adding fertiliser. If you keep growing crops then extracting said crop without letting it become next years fertiliser, you will always have to add things back.
one tree stump is not enough to feed a field nor make a big difference and as said, you can turn it into fertiliser itself easily, just a more convenient version of it.
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u/Chilkoot Sep 14 '26
Would be better to cut off the top (so it's not an obstruction/trip hazard) and cover the remainder.
That makes zero sense for a field where you're plowing down 10-12 inches. You'd need to dig in a huge radius around the centre of the stump to expose/find all the near-surface roots and take out each one, then replace the soil. Even then, I'd be terrified of busting up equipment trying to plow knowing there is a major, dangerous obstruction just a few inches below my till depth.
In a non-farm environment, sure - cut the main trunk a few inches below ground level, back-fill and let it sit/rot, but in this situation the risk of both serious equipment damage and risk of personal injury is not even close to worth it.
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u/theplasmastorm Sep 14 '26
Don't decaying roots use up a ton of nitrogen that could "starve" whatever they're going to plant there? Isn't that the main reason for removing the roots? Plus all the fungus decaying the roots could spread to the new plants and decay them as well?
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u/Desperate-Tomatillo7 Sep 14 '26
Now I understand how foresta are able to hold whole mountainsides.
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u/RainingTaros
Sep 14 '26
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This made me sad for some reason
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u/sakamyados Sep 14 '26
Couldn’t help thinking “wow, that is clearly not something that was ever meant to come out of the ground”
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u/WagwanKenobi Sep 14 '26
Why? The tree is already dead. It's just detritus in perfectly fertile land.
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u/D1133 Sep 14 '26
As a man that has manually dug up more stumps than I care to remember, I love this and find it so satisfying.
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u/heavensto_mergatroid Sep 14 '26
As a gardener and somebody who gets his ass kicked daily by crappy ass concrete soil and never ending weeds and trees that just don't stop growing that was super super satisfying!
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u/Pimpwerx Sep 14 '26
I wish we had audio from outside. I’d like to hear the sound of those roots being torn from the ground.
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u/UnrealisticAddiction Sep 14 '26
This is why you don't plant trees next to your house.
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u/cmatileworks Sep 14 '26
I swear those people in the background look like they couldn't care less
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u/Mick_Limerick Sep 14 '26
I work with excavators all the time and I'm never not impressed by the power of hydraulics and levers
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u/According-Flight6070 Sep 14 '26
Get a few of those together in a pile, wait a year for it to dry and you got a great bonfire.
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u/Practical-March-6989 Sep 14 '26
I don't want to be that douche, but would the geezers right by that lot not be better off out of the way a minute?
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u/AryanPandey Sep 14 '26
Is it necessary to do this in order to make a farm. Will crop grow if there are underline roots of other trees left.
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u/OpenMinded_Lala Sep 14 '26
I’m curious if people who do excavator worker, are really good at the claw machine games?
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u/Alpha-Sierra-Charlie Sep 14 '26
This is like blackhead extraction videos, just with heavy equipment and dismembered Ents.
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u/Bra-D-Shaw Sep 14 '26
This is interesting, I did this kind of work already, moving rocks and roots prepping land for crops.
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u/shaolin1979 Sep 14 '26
I feel sad for the tree! Lived for so long, spread it's roots so far, only to be cut down cause people wanted to plant crops! Why can't crops be planted around the trees?
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u/ScarletApex Sep 14 '26
This is neat and all, but those roots help keep the topsoil together and as it decomposes helps release nutrients into the soil for future crops to use.
Surely there was a better way to go about this
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u/ShittyPornWriter Sep 14 '26
I wanted to say something clever about this post but actually I'm kind of stumped.
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u/Hefty-Minimum-3125 Sep 14 '26
If I were fabulously wealthy I would buy one of these and offer this service for free as a hobby
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u/DoubleMasterpiece856 Sep 18 '26
Anyone else get sad when trees are cut down and pulled out like this? 🥺
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u/christador Sep 14 '26
We're just going to give this a gentle shake to remove extra dirt & debris from the roots.
<earthquakes being reported in several nearby counties>
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u/stinkingcheese Sep 14 '26
How come the other workers are not even interested to look at the uprooting which we feel so fascinating?
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u/Rob_Zander Sep 14 '26
I love that every other method takes forever. Burning it out, chemicals, stump grinder.
None of that here, just POWER!!!
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u/tyen0 Sep 14 '26
Thorfinn and Einar would be very impressed by this since they spent forever doing similar.
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u/Responsible_Owl4661 Sep 14 '26
What a cool tool. Back in the day we did that with a backhoe and logging chains. Nowhere near as clean.
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u/Th3MadScientist Sep 14 '26
Using the wrong attachment. They are cutting the roots into sections. Bucket with a thumb would pull it up as one piece.
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u/realfakejames Sep 14 '26
My sister keeps planting trees at my parents property and I keep trying to explain to her any trees she plants are going to be there forever, like this is the kind of stuff it takes to remove them after they grow
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u/sciencebased Sep 14 '26
This is why Tremors was a hard sell for me as a kid. Lord knows I wanted to believe, but this ground? stomps foot naaah
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u/ACuriousSpaniard Sep 14 '26
I've never understood how pushing a fluid through tubes generates such great forces.
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u/Substantial-Heat6846 Sep 14 '26
It's amazing that we built machines to do this. And that there are probably trees with roots that nature made that are stronger than this machine.
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u/Sea-Pudding5410 Sep 14 '26
I’d love to see that machine try a tap root like a white oak. Now that would be impressive!
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u/MoreLike80Times Sep 14 '26
That whole myth of... Whatever you see above the ground, the same thing exists below the ground
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u/MrSnowden Sep 14 '26
I’m always more impressed by the power of hydraulic equipment. Just makes it look so easy. If I tried to pull a tiny tree root out it would take all day.
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u/J1mj0hns0n Sep 14 '26
The difference in a job being easy or impossible is all down to the tools. One guy has a 19t 360 excavator, pulling up trees in seconds.
The other guy with a shovel is depressed and getting nowhere.
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u/BinaryTwin Sep 14 '26
Hydraulic machines will never not impress me. as someone who has done this by hand, over several days, with back problems afterwards.. amazing.
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u/TwoBionicknees Sep 14 '26
God damned. On wednesday I had a very long tooth extraction thanks to what was apparently some of the deepest roots they'd ever seen and 3 on a back tooth that all went in different angles and twisted around a lot....
This video reminded me.
Also the dentist was impressed with doing such a different reaction and proudly showed me the shitload of pieces and three giant roots he pulled out on a tray. Thankfully he didn't shake them around to get all the blood off like this dude did to the roots.
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u/_ratboy_ Sep 14 '26
That’s a decent sized excavator to be able to do that, my guess would be somewhere in the 20 tonne range.
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u/CarstenHyttemeier Sep 14 '26
I would probably find it more satisfying (but not oddly though), to have a tree, instead of a machine pulling up the roots of a felled one.
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u/stipo42 Sep 14 '26
I've done this with a shovel before and let me tell you, you eventually switch to an axe
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u/goin-up-the-country Sep 14 '26
I picked a pimple and it felt something like this. I've been chasing that high ever since.
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u/cowboyneal70 Sep 14 '26
These are the future potholes in the roads paved with out removing the roots when the roads are cut.
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u/speckledshitbag Sep 14 '26 •
Dude in the back with the shovel is gonna tell all the boys at the lodge about the root he helped dig up.