It finally happened. After months of me sitting on the fence dad gave up on me and bought a loader tractor himself. Let’s not focus on the machine. Let’s talk about the first day of usage. We filled in a hole in my yard, hauled 8 loads of lime and manure out to the fields. Then we put a nice layer of bedding into the cattle barn so my moos would have a nice, comfy, clean bed for a few days of forecasted cold rain. All in about 5 hours.

I am telling you from experience, based on my availability, that’s about a month’s worth of work. Probably more than that as it encouraged us to do work I was simply not doing. It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that other jobs came first on the list. After you fill a manure spreader three times in one day by hand it’s nice to just sit on your tookus for a minute. It’s hard to get into the back corners of the horse barn to clean out the manure but it was easier since the machine did the heavy lifting. Plus I work off-farm and that takes more than just my daylight hours, I come home tired…so it’s just hard to get it all done.

Let’s put a few numbers to this deal. It takes me the better part of an hour to load up a manure spreader. First I use the pitchfork and pry out a bit of material about 4 feet from the spreader and toss that in. Then I work in a line toward the spreader tossing in each little scoop. Like a typewriter, I work line by line backward and toward the spreader. This leaves lots of small, loose crumbles of compost behind that I alter scoop up with a flat shovel. Then I use a round point shovel to put an even layer of lime on top of all of that. Each shovel of lime weighs maybe 10 pounds. It takes a lot of shoveling to cover the spreader with a half inch of lime.

The loader tractor filled the spreader with four scoops of composted manure and one scoop of lime. It may have taken all of 5 minutes to load up the spreader. Happy days!

So we scraped up manure here, scooped out manure there. There were places we couldn’t get the tractor so we had to dig manure out by hand but we had been so lazy all day we had the energy remaining to get the work done. It was great! Dad drove the loader, warm in the cab. I spread the material (driving into the wind!). Then we filled in groundhog holes with lime, spread fresh bedding for horses and cattle, moved material that had been sitting for multiple years and called it a day. We still went home tired but we were tired after doing much more work than we could have accomplished previously.

So two things. I don’t know if bigger is necessarily better. A smaller tractor or a Bobcat could have gone places this tractor just can’t go but this tractor never even hesitated about scooping up lime. Second, the farm simply can’t afford a loader tractor at this time. Dad bought the tractor. But now that we have it around I have to agree that we can’t afford to be without it. On that line of thinking I got a series of notes from a friend some time ago encouraging me to buy a loader.

We did it, we bought a loader.  We just no longer can lift or move anything without getting hurt, and renting or borrowing a loader to clean out our deep bedding was too expensive.  We figure it’s an investment for our daughter. I don’t want her broken down like we are.  I got a leg up of sorts with my brothers used equipment, which we have slowly upgraded.  My husband is good about taking care of things, and he’s good with equipment so the tractor should last our farming life and as long as she wants to mess with it.  Too many things were left undone, now with forks and a loader we have been cleaning up like crazy.  Now if we can just get rid of the things we have gathered up that we don’t need we’ll be looking like a respectable farm.

and later…

BUY YOUR LOADER!!  You don’t want to end up broken down at 57 because you dug manure by hand and carried how many bags of chicken feed…

and later…

[Husband] is a heavy equipment operator, and skid steers are a [bear] to work with compared to a good loader.  Too low of ground clearance etc for deep bedding, he was stuck all the time, and subsequently we were stuck too, renting it from the neighbor or the rental business.  He only got stuck once with the tractor, and since he didn’t get stuck he didn’t tear up the ground like usual with the skid steer.  You know I think you should buy a tractor, maybe a used one?  I’ll stop now.  Because I am going to take a pallet of hay over to the corral for my heifers…with the tractor 😉

So there you go. Dad bought a used loader tractor big enough to replace his primary machine. I think I would have gone smaller but he bought a lightly used 60 horse tractor for the price of a new 40 horse. Plus it has a cab for a little dose of A/C when he’s putting up hay, wind protection and warmth when we are horsing around in the winter. Now all we need is a PTO-mounted post hole digger, some gates, a mountain of fencing, a new roof on the barn…