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Screening top soil

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One guy, one skid steer, and a spinning drum turn a rock-filled yard into plantable dirt.

Andrew Camarata’s channel runs on solo, unscripted jobsite footage, and his latest upload drops a new tool into the mix: a skid-steer-mounted topsoil screener. In “Screening top soil,” Camarata scoops raw, rock-and-root-choked earth straight off a residential lawn job and feeds it into the attachment’s rotating drum, sifting out everything that doesn’t belong in a finished lawn bed.

• Camarata runs a compact track loader fitted with a rotary screening drum attachment, powered off the machine’s auxiliary hydraulics.
• The spinning drum separates fine, usable topsoil from rocks, root balls, sod clumps, and other debris in one continuous pass.
• The screened soil gets redistributed and graded across the property to set up a smooth, rock-free base for the new lawn.

The Setup: A New Attachment, the Same One-Man Operation

Camarata’s whole model is built on doing jobs that normally take a crew with just one operator and one machine, and the topsoil screener fits that pattern. Instead of hand-raking rocks and root fragments out of a yard, he scoops native dirt directly with the skid steer’s bucket and dumps it into the hopper end of the screener attachment, letting the machine do the sorting work a landscaping crew would otherwise do by hand.

The attachment bolts onto the front of the compact track loader in place of a standard bucket and draws its power from the skid steer’s auxiliary hydraulic lines, the same circuit that runs augers, brush cutters, and other high-demand attachments. That hydraulic flow spins the internal drum fast enough to shake soil apart without needing a separate engine or power source on the attachment itself.

Mechanism of Drum Dirt Filtration

The core of the attachment is a cylindrical, mesh-sided drum mounted at an angle. As raw material tumbles through it, fine soil particles fall through the mesh openings onto the ground below, while anything larger than the screen size, rocks, root balls, chunks of sod, stays trapped inside and works its way to the discharge end for removal.

The rotating drum catches everything from fist-sized rocks to tangled root balls and sod clumps, leaving only fine, plantable soil to fall through onto the yard below.

That single pass does the job that would otherwise require screening by shovel and hand-sieve, or hauling in fresh, pre-screened topsoil from a supplier. By processing the dirt that’s already on-site, Camarata skips the cost and delivery hassle of trucking in new material entirely.

From Screened Pile to Finished Grade

Once the drum has done its work, the fine soil piles up beneath the attachment and Camarata switches back to grading mode, spreading and leveling the screened material across the yard with the skid steer. The goal is a smooth, debris-free base ready for seed or sod, the kind of finish that’s hard to get when the underlying dirt is still full of stones and root fragments.

It’s the same practical, camera-on approach that’s made his channel a go-to for anyone curious how heavy-equipment work actually gets done, in the same vein as the build-it-yourself footage in Turning $0.01 Into a House in 1 Week: Days 7-28, where the appeal is watching a real process unfold start to finish rather than a highlight reel.

For viewers who follow Camarata’s other equipment videos, the screener slots in as one more attachment in a growing lineup he’s used to tackle jobs solo, right alongside the excavators, trucks, and loaders that show up across his channel’s long-running catalog of property and equipment content, the kind of hands-on, no-narration footage that’s carved out its own lane on YouTube, similar in spirit to the scale-driven stunts covered in World’s Largest Challenge!.

By the end of the video, the yard that started as a mess of rocky, root-tangled dirt is graded flat and screened clean, ready for grass, no supplier delivery truck, no second crew, just the skid steer and the drum doing the work in one pass.