PIERCE
LAND
CLEARING
Del Valle sits on Colorado River bottom land and blackland prairie, eight miles from the middle of Austin. Ground that close to town rarely gets a pond, and it holds water better than most of what does.
Yes, and the ground here is unusually forgiving. Del Valle sits where the Colorado River bottom meets the Blackland Prairie, so you are digging in alluvial soil over clay rather than fighting rock.
Del Valle sits in the Colorado River bottom on the eastern edge of Austin. The soil is alluvial on top, dropped there by the river over a very long time, with Blackland Prairie clay underneath and around it. Both of those are pond ground.
Clay is what seals a basin. Compacted properly as the pond is cut and the dam built, it holds water without a liner and without bentonite. That is the single biggest cost difference between building here and building thirty minutes west in the limestone.
The flip side of river bottom ground is that a lot of it is low. Some of Del Valle sits in the Colorado floodplain, and a pond built in the wrong spot is a pond that silts up in the first big year, or that raises questions you do not want with the county.
We check where you sit before we quote, not after. If the good pond site on your place is in the floodplain we will say so and talk about what that means. Sometimes the answer is to move it fifty yards, and sometimes it is to build smaller and deeper.
Most people have never had a pond built and do not know what the week looks like. Here is the whole thing, from the first phone call to the day it starts holding water.
It starts with photos of the site and a rough idea of size. We answer with a same-day ballpark off the published price list, and if the number works for you, we schedule the site walk. No sales funnel, just a conversation.
We walk the ground with you, find where the water already wants to collect, check where you sit relative to the floodplain, and dig a test pit to see what is under the grass. That pit is where the quote stops being a guess.
The quote reads like a plan, not a mystery: dig, dam, spillway, and any contingency for rock, each priced in machine days. If clearing is needed first, it is on the same sheet at our published day rates. What is written is what you pay.
Within a few weeks of signing, the lowboy delivers the iron. All we need from you is gate access wide enough for the machines and somewhere to drop the trailer. Everything else is on us.
Most ponds take two to five working days. The sequence never changes: strip and save the topsoil, cut the core trench, raise the dam in thin compacted lifts, shape the basin. Watch as much of it as you like from outside the swing radius.
The build ends with a walkthrough, not an invoice. Dam, spillway, slopes, and dressed banks, checked against the quote with you standing there. Anything off gets fixed before the lowboy is loaded.
Then you wait on weather. Clay has to be worked dry to compact, so we book around the forecast rather than through it. It is the frustrating part, and it is also what decides whether the dam holds.
Published, not hidden behind a form. Prices and build times are based on 6 feet of depth at center with a 4:1 bank.
| Pond Size | Starting Price at 6 ft depth, 4:1 bank | Build Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1/4 acre | from $12,300 | 2 to 3 days |
| 1/2 acre | from $19,200 | 3 to 4 days |
| 3/4 acre | from $23,300 | 4 to 5 days |
| 1 acre | from $27,000 | 5 to 6 days |
| 1 1/4 acre | from $30,400 | 6 to 7 days |
| 1 1/2 acre | from $33,800 | 7 to 8 days |
| 1 3/4 acre | from $36,800 | 8 to 9 days |
| 2 acre | from $39,500 | 9 to 10 days |
Prices are based on six feet of depth at centre with a 4:1 bank. Around Del Valle a sealing line item is rarely needed. What moves the number here is usually access and floodplain: a good deal of this ground sits low enough that where the pond goes matters as much as how big it is.
Size it, tell us what to do with the dirt, then draw the pond right on a photo of your land. Your estimate comes back by email, along with a preview of the finished water.
Every quote we write splits the same honest way. Here is what is inside the number and what gets flagged separately.
Every quote covers the complete pond: watershed-matched siting, staking, saved topsoil, a true core trench, a dam raised in compacted lifts, a shaped spillway, mowable slope finishes, and banks dressed with the topsoil we saved. Transport of the machines is included, as is the final walkthrough.
What moves the number on a Del Valle job: how far a lowboy can get in, whether the site needs clearing first, how far the spoil travels, whether the site is low enough to need extra freeboard on the dam, and whether you want the dirt spread, stockpiled or shaped into a pad.
Real ponds, real day counts, photographed on site.
Digging on the blackland
Pond build on Manor blackland
Elgin pond dirt workFull process, statewide services, and the build standard: our Texas pond construction page.
Del Valle is eight miles from downtown and still has real acreage on it, which is getting rarer every year. The places that call us here are usually holding ground that has been in a family a while, or that somebody bought precisely because it was land rather than lot. A pond is one of the few improvements that makes a property more useful and more valuable at the same time.
Pond sites sit in low ground, and low ground near the river grows brush hard. Mesquite, elm, hackberry and greenbriar usually have to come out before a machine can shape anything. We are a land clearing company that also builds ponds, so the clearing and the dig happen on one mobilisation with one crew and one bill.
The chart starts at six feet of depth at centre and six feet will hold. If the pond matters to you in a dry August, go deeper. Eight feet or more keeps a cold layer at the bottom, slows evaporation and holds weed and algae growth down. Depth is cheap while the excavator is already sitting there.
This is a part of Texas that can take five inches in an afternoon, and river bottom ground gets the runoff from everything upstream of it. A pond here needs a spillway cut to grade and a dam built wide enough not to be overtopped. That work is invisible once the water is in and it is what decides whether the pond is still there in thirty years.
A new pond looks raw. Bare banks, water the colour of the clay it came out of, and a season before that settles. Get grass established on the banks before the first big rain and the pond clears faster and stops feeding silt back into itself.
Every pond starts filling in the day it is finished, and near the river that clock runs faster. Grass cover on the watershed, stock fenced off the approach, and a small forebay to catch sediment before it reaches the main basin will buy you decades.
If cattle drink from it, keep them off the dam. Hoof traffic on a dam face is the most common way a sound pond becomes a leaking one. A fenced pond with a gravity trough below it costs a little more up front and outlasts an open one.
You learn what your pond is worth in the third hot August. A six foot pond gets low, warm and green. A nine foot pond keeps a cold layer at the bottom and comes through it. Everyone we know who went deeper is glad they did.
A pond is dirt work first, but it does not have to end there. One call covers everything from grass on the dam to fish in the water.
Bare banks wash, and low ground washes worse. We seed and mat the disturbed ground with a mix suited to Central Texas so the first storm does not put your dam back in the basin.
Moving water stays cleaner. An aerator or fountain keeps oxygen right through the column, holds algae back through summer, and is the difference between water you swim in and water you look at.
A dock or a hardened approach turns a pond into somewhere you go rather than something you own. We can shape and compact for one while the machines are still on site, which is far cheaper than bringing them back.
Fish want structure and depth before they want stocking. We leave brush piles, a drop off and a shelf while the basin is open, so the pond is built to hold fish before you put any in.
Hiring them to clear a piece of land on which we eventually want to build our future home was one of the best decisions I have made. First and foremost, the quality of their work is excellent. Second, these guys do not skimp.
Charles Schroeder, Google review
A great investment for our property. Showed up exactly when Preston said he would, worked hard all day long without a break with a beast of a machine. He had a very good understanding of what I wanted to do, and did it. The results are fantastic.
Karl Wendler, Google review
These guys are great! We booked a date and they showed up on time and went straight to work. Taylor, the owner, answered all of my text messages promptly. I have five acres of very dense elm and oak trees.
alan baldree, Google review
The site walk comes with vocabulary. Here is what the crew means when they say it.
Four feet of run for every foot of drop. Gentler banks are safer and easier to mow; steeper banks get more depth from less dirt.
The dry dam height above full pool, the safety margin that keeps a big storm inside the pond.
Every acre of ground that sheds rain toward your pond. It, not the hole, decides how fast you get water.
The water level at the bottom of the spillway, the highest the pond is designed to hold day to day.
Where the dam dirt comes from. On a well designed pond it is the basin itself, so every yard dug does double duty.
One acre of water a foot deep, about 326,000 gallons. The unit that decides whether a stock pond needs a state permit.
Pricing starts at $12,300 for a quarter acre at six feet deep with a 4:1 bank, up to $39,500 for two acres, with an $8,000 minimum. Those are starting numbers on ground that behaves. Access and whether the site needs clearing first are what usually move them here.
Nearly always. You are on alluvial soil over Blackland Prairie clay, which compacts into a natural seal. Ponds here rarely need a liner or bentonite. We still dig a test pit before quoting, because the honest answer comes out of the ground rather than off a soil map.
It can matter a lot. A pond built inside the floodplain will take everybody else runoff and silt in faster, and it can raise permitting questions. We check where your site sits before quoting and will tell you plainly if the obvious spot is the wrong spot.
Usually some of it. Pond sites sit low and low ground near the river grows brush thick. Because we clear land as our main trade, the brush and the basin are the same trip and the same bill rather than two contractors and two transport charges.
On your own rural land, generally no, and agricultural water storage is exempt from most regulation in Texas. That changes if the pond dams a defined watercourse or sits in the floodplain. We will tell you which applies to your place before anything starts.
Six feet at centre is where the price list starts and it holds water. Eight or more is the recommendation if you want the pond to come through a dry summer looking like a pond. Adding depth later means bringing the machines back, which costs far more than doing it once.
Around 34 inches of rain a year here, most of it spring and autumn. A pond sized off the chart usually fills over one or two wet seasons, quicker if it has a decent catchment feeding it. We size the watershed on the walk so the answer is about your ground, not an average.
Yes, and on older Del Valle places that is often the better job. River bottom ground moves a lot of water, so the dam and the spillway earn their keep. Rebuilding the dam with a proper key trench, sealing the basin and cutting a spillway that suits the catchment usually costs less than a new build.
Tell us roughly how big you want the water and where you are thinking of putting it. We will walk the ground, dig a test pit, check where you sit relative to the floodplain, and give you a written number.