Little Acres Grading, Cherryville NCOwner-operated by Rodney Little · 30+ years

Thirty Years of
Moving Dirt

Rodney Little has thirty years of experience running equipment. Little Acres Grading works the western Piedmont — Gaston, Lincoln, Catawba, Burke, Caldwell, Cleveland and Rutherford counties. Little Acres Grading is his own outfit, based in Cherryville, and it is deliberately small — he would rather do a handful of jobs properly than run three crews he cannot watch.

What that means in practice: the person who walks your property and writes your estimate is the person running the machine when the work starts. There is no salesman in between. Some jobs need a trade or a machine we do not run ourselves, and where they do we bring in a subcontractor we have worked with — you will know who is coming and what they are doing before they turn up, and Rodney is still the one on site and still the one you call.

Thirty years on equipment is worth something specific, and so is being on this ground week in and week out. He knows the parcels off Highway 274 where rock is shallow, the bottomland along the South Fork that will not hold a pad without work, and how fast a bare Burke County slope moves in a hard rain. That knowledge is what makes an estimate accurate instead of hopeful.

If you are weighing us against somebody else, our guide to choosing a grading contractor sets out what to check on any bid, ours included.

All of that shows up in the day-to-day work — the grading, clearing and driveway jobs on our home page are the same seven counties, year in and year out.