On a vacant lot in the northeast US, used for haying in the past, myself and a few other people started different farming projects on it. It is very wet and had an especially wet year in the past. Traffic is relatively low but we do drive pickup trucks on the field during the growing season and have had very occasional heavier trucks deliver materials.
The path we drive on is now very rutted, as expected. Road work was planned before the past growing season but was not completed. We're still trying to line up some basic road work, expecting that means installing a culvert and a gravel driveway for the worst spots. We're getting pros on it ASAP but they are busy.
My question for this community is what kind of activities would you expect to fix ruts like this, and how much worse do these issues get each year they go unaddressed? I understand compaction gets worse and the soil will only become more and more likely to puddle and become inaccessible more frequently and longer - I'm looking for confirmation and clarifications about that.
Here's some pictures.
This is entering the field. You're on a paved town road, then you pull off onto 20x20ft gravel driveway the town built, and that slopes down into this muddy path.
This is between two fields on site, over a hundred feet away from the entrance in the image above. This is a clearer case of a culvert being needed along with plenty of gravel.
Between the two images is about 150ft of rutted ground that stays relatively dry. We are thinking these two problem areas need 50ft or so of proper gravel driveway installed and a culvert in one or both areas. For the drier stretch we're thinking pickup trucks and the soil can tolerate it, and ideally we will at least spread 3-4 inches of woodchips every few years, to make a path that gets less degraded each use.