Digging up new idea

Ditch Doctor puts new spin on traditional process

When Adam Fisher was a young kid helping his father clean out drainage ditches, he often pondered about why there wasn’t a more efficient process.

The traditional method then and now is to clean out the ditch with an excavator and truck the material away.

For highway ditches, the bare earth left behind would then have to be replanted to prevent erosion issues. And then at some later point, the process would all have to be repeated.

“It didn’t make sense to me we didn’t have something to a specific job,” the Glenholme businessman said, of his boyhood musings some 30 years ago.

Ditching and dredging became Fisher’s profession and despite continuing to operate in the traditional fashion, the prospect of creating a better way never left him.

In 2000, after much trial and error, he came up with a prototype for a rotary machine, called the Ditch Doctor, that attaches to the arm of an excavator. As the excavator moves parallel to the ditch, the machine, which has a sort of grinding wheel encased in a housing, spins up the material

and blows it out, distributing it along the embankment.

“The most important thing, I guess, is that it maintains all the vegetation on slopes,” Fisher said, especially in sandy areas where it takes longer for vegetation to grow.

“So it’s a faster, more cost effective way of cleaning out, maintaining and restoring an existing ditch,” said Carole Fisher, his wife and business partner.

And it’s friendly to the environment because you don’t need as

much equipment as the traditional excavator bucket method.

Because there is nothing on the market comparable to his creation, Fisher’s dream since creating the prototype has been to have it professionally manufactured. He has now reached that stage and is at the point where he wants to take it to the next level.

“And now we’re wanting to try and sell the product (to others in the industry),” said Carole Fisher.

More information on the Ditch Doctor can be found at http://www.ditchdoctor.ca/

TC MEDIA PHOTO Adam and Carole Fisher of Glenholme are in the process of trying to market their Ditch Doctor, a piece of machinery that attaches to an excavator as a more efficient and environmentally friendly way of dredging out ditches.