Many times throughout my columns, I’ve mentioned working with our skid steer. It is a multitasking piece of equipment that we could not do without. My husband and I both use it every single day all year long for a number of different jobs.
Every morning, I use it to feed our outside heifers, loading up three buckets full of feed we have stored in our silage bags. Before I hop into the skid steer, I walk out to the heifer barn and check their feed supply. Sometimes if they haven’t cleaned off their plate for whatever reason, I bring the skid steer over there first, using it to swipe the area clean of leftovers before I fill with fresh feed.
My husband uses it, after he gets done milking, to fill the cow wagon with corn silage and haylage. Depending on what we need to do that day, we either leave it on the yard or it gets stored back into the shed. That night, husband again uses it to refill the cow wagon for their night feeding. When I go out for chores at night and see the skid steer parked in a certain spot, that tells me he didn’t have time to feed heifers and the night feeding is left for me. He doesn’t even have to tell me. I just look for the skid steer and know.
Besides feeding, I use the skid steer for hauling crushed red rock from my stash stored by the shed. I scoop up a load and, taking a gravel shovel along, drive right up to where I need to refill crushed red rock. It works like a charm. I fill holes in the driveway with gravel in the same manner.
I haul garbage with the skid steer. Driving over to each garbage pail, I lower my bucket, load the pails and haul them out to the road. I fill that bucket to overflow with garbage pails, recyclables, paper bags filled with newspapers, bundled, used silage bags, anything that needs to be hauled to the curb.
In the winter, I haul wood from our woodpile to our wood stove with the skid steer. It saves me time, energy and back strain. I use it to plow snow. We use it to pick stones in the spring. We use it to haul the cumbersome backstop to and from the silo bags each harvest. Occasionally, my husband uses it to haul newborn calves up from the cow pasture, placing them in the bucket and giving them a ride in.
I have to say, not all jobs I do with the skid steer are productive. This year, for the first time, we harvested big square bales, 800 pounds apiece! We had a custom hire come in and it took him not long at all to form 27 square hay bales for us in a field close to the farm. My husband hauled them home one-by-one with a tractor with a round bale spear hooked up on a three-point hitch. He backed up to each one, jabbed it with the spear and carted it home.
He got one on our yard and almost into the shed when the string came loose and the whole thing tumbled off the spear. There it laid, sprawled out on the lawn next to the shed. He figured we could cart it over to our inside-the-barn calves and feed it out to them as needed; that way nothing would go to waste.
The next morning, I had the bright idea, before I fed my heifers, to haul a bucket full of this good hay into the barn with the skid steer. Driving it over to the pile of hay, I scooped up a heaping portion and carefully headed around the barn to the cow yard where I proceeded to drive the skid steer over the little step up into the barn.
Getting inside the barn with very little room to spare, I cautiously turned (these skid steers turn on a dime), and raising the bucket oh so slowly, carefully dumped my load of dry hay into a clean, empty pen that we were storing calf hay in. I was feeling rather smug about how ingeniously I had handled this when all of a sudden I found myself getting doused in a shower of water. I had unknowingly burst a water pipe with the side of my skid steer bucket!
Oh-Lord-have-mercy-now-what! Immediately, because of my screeching, my husband came running and after a few choice words quickly went and turned off the water. This water supply was needed for the cows’ outside water tank—a necessity.
After milking and feeding, we tended to the busted pipe. My husband had to stand on a bale of hay to reach the pipe. Turning the stubborn pipe with a pipe wrench and finally wrenching it free, he found a plug that fit. Not needing water to that unoccupied pen, for now plugging it would have to suffice until we got a new pipe.
In a completely different setting, a while ago I was backing the skid steer out of the shed when I didn’t notice our truck parked at an angle behind me. Clunk! I had backed right into the side of the truck with the back corner of the skid steer, creating a nice little dent that’s there to this day.
We use our skid steer all year round on the farm, and it is one piece of equipment that we could not do without. I just have to watch out for those water pipes and farm trucks, that’s all.
(“My son, preserve sound judgment and discernment, do not let them out of your sight.” Proverbs 3:21)
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