The Christmas Gift our ranch received this year is a shiny new tractor.
I may have mentioned 10 or 20 times before that our very generous favorite neighbors, Roger and Melanie, have allowed us to use their tractor for the past couple of years.
It has saved us (and our backs) countless hours of labor and we truly appreciate it. We’ve used it for lots of things, including some which probably aren’t in the tractor manual.
Though it seemed to be quite to her liking.
You can’t take advantage of your neighbor’s generosity forever though, and the time has come to turn our rocky ground into lush, green pastures with straight, strong fences for our cattle. To do that you need implements, lots of implements. To use implements you need a tractor.
It is kind of funny to me that when we first bought this ranch five years ago Rick said “We will need lots of equipment.” I said “What would be possibly need equipment for?” What was I thinking? You need lots of equipment.
So, we got a tractor and implements to do the jobs we need to turn our ground into pasture. An added bonus is you can use the tractor for other things too.
Remember our watering system for the cattle?
It works great as long as it rains – which it does pretty often here. We’ve had a few weeks of unseasonably dry weather though, so then we have to use our backup plan.
We load a 55 gallon barrel into the bucket and fill it with water.
Drive the tractor down the pasture, raise the bucket and open the valve to fill the cattle trough.
The gravity feed works pretty well.
It’s not the best system ever, we do plan to put in a water line this summer, but in the meantime it works.
Can’t wait for Mark to see this one…