Nothing on our farm beats our skidder. This little piece of equipment is versatile enough to handle a multitude of various chores, such as picking stones, plowing snow, clearing brush, hauling newborn calves (back in the day) as well as cleaning and feeding cows and heifers.
Also, as far as I’m concerned, our side-by-side UTV complete with a winch, is right up there at the top of the list of versatile equipment. I employ it for any outside chore and we’ve also been known to occasionally use it to pick stones and haul seed to the fields. Plus it’s just fun to drive around county roads and along trails.
Of course, we always need our tractors for chisel plowing, hauling manure and pulling things out of mud as well as skidding logs. My husband custom-plants for guys’ food plots so we hung onto our corn planter and grain drill. We’ve since sold equipment off as we had no need of — such as our disc bine and one tractor, a gravity box and our bagger.
The skidder has four attachments my husband interchanges easily. There’s two levers he can reach when stretching from a sitting position — up to loosen and down to snap into place. When it’s time to feed, he engages the feed bucket. When he’s cleaning barns he uses the bucket specifically for that job. When he wants to bed heifers, he attaches a fork bucket to grab a big round soybean or cornstalk bale from the barn mow. Carting sand into the barn, he uses it to bed cows.
When it’s time to pick stone,s he attaches a stone picker, which is a bucket with slats. We can pick stones and not even get out of, or off of, any piece of equipment, which back in the day would have come in very handy. Now he scoops the stones up, hoists them to the back of the bucket and the dirt filters through the slats back onto the field, leaving only the stones in the bucket. Driving over to the stone fence, we dump them there.
This is the only way I’ll pick stones. Used to be we walked the field — bending and throwing, bending and throwing — or piling stones in a pile to come round and pick them up. Hard work.
The other day, I was outside using the side-by-side to cart buckets of flowers to spots and haul my tools around the yard, raking and picking up errant branches. It has a bed where I can throw stuff in and using the hoist, unload clippings, etc. easily. My cell jingled.
“Hey, come down here with the four-wheeler, I’m stuck.”
I knew exactly what field he was in. He was pushing big tree branches off that field as we’d had a pretty substantial wind storm the day before. Getting down there I spotted him, his skidder sunk in mud.
“Drive up close to me,” says he.
“Oh no. We’re not gonna use the winch on the wheeler. It’s not gonna work!”
“Yes, we are, and yes, it will.”
“It’s not strong enough!” my voice raising an octave.
I must confess — I underestimate the strength of the winch as well as my husband’s judgement. Needless to say, I pulled him out without a problem.
A while back, we were up in the woods cleaning tap lines after our sap season. We were at the top of the hill with our diesel tractor, pulling a trailer with the tote full of a food-grade cleaning solution. My job was to start the wand pump after he walked the lines, one at a time, closing taps. When he’d get to the bottom he’d yell up, “OK!” and I’d start the pump.
When the lines were flushed I heard another “OK!” and I’d shut the pump off, drive down the hill with our four-wheeler and pick him up. Tractor, trailer and four-wheeler would then move to the next line — so on and so forth, until we reached the last line. Almost done.
This line was at the very top of the top of the hill.
“OK, turn the four-wheeler around and drive down the hill. I’ll come with the tractor.”
Looking at the area in which to turn around, all I saw was large, rounded stones and no clear path.
“Nope. You turn me around and then I’ll take over.”
Grunting something unintelligible, he got in and proceeded to get caught up on one large stone so that the entire wheeler was not on four wheels, but barely two.
“Hang onto the back corner and pull down!” he hollers out the window.
“Huh?” I hung on and couldn’t do a thing.
“Dear Jesus,” I pleaded. “Send meeeeee your angels.”
He did. They came.
Our side-by-side straightened.
When we exchanged places he exhaled one word: “Ooof.”
He doesn’t often get rattled, but he was rattled.
Our two most-needed and very versatile pieces of farm equipment, our skidder and four wheeler — and angels at the ready.
(“Are they not all ministering spirits, sent out to render service for the sake of those who will inherit salvation? Hebrews 1:14)
Kay Reminger was born and raised on a dairy farm, and she married her high school sweetheart, who happened to farm for a living in Leopolis. Writing for quite a few years, she remains focused on the blessings of living the ups and downs of rural life from a farm wife’s perspective.
Farm Life From a Farm Wife
