I have to stake some property lines.?ÿ
Really hate to do it but there isn't another option so I have to lay down this grass.?ÿ
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I met with the rancher and asked if he had any of those cow things cause I found some grass for them.?ÿ
He just said; "Funny guy".
This half mile took about 15 minutes once I figured out where it goes. One fenced out field to the north had grass up to my shoulders as I drove through it. It's really disorientating driving through that stuff, never knowing what's under the 4-wheeler. To say it's been a good grass year is a huge understatement. Everywhere I go it's like this, not enough cows and way too much grass.?ÿ
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Make hay while the sun shines.
So that must be why the stocker cattle prices are ridiculous. Running from 50 to 70 cents per pound higher than last year at this same time. We are very far behind on moisture so quite a few guys are selling off or selling out. One of my pastures would be empty now if I didn't have water supplied by my Rural Water District. Not cheap, but, trying to rebuild a herd later isn't cheap, either.
It is funny. Good grass not enough cows poor grass to many cows. Building a herd is not cheap. I started from scratch and still developing my herd. Looking at new Bull genetics now will need one bad next year. Also some new heifers. I have chosen to get rid of a few not producing like i want. Maybe one day it will be sound and i can actually make a little money.
I was staking an outfall sanitary sewer once along the flat bottom area adjacent to a local river. This was back-in-the-day of tape and transit surveying and "line of sight" was definitely required. This one particular field was covered with six foot (and taller) wild sunflowers. We couldn't see ten feet in front of us.
I had my gunner setting on a PI looking up line. I got in the van and slowly pulled away from the gun in an attempt to "clear" some line. I hadn't gone twenty feet when it became evident I needed a navigator. My tail chainman climbed up on top of the van and was sitting on his knees looking back toward the instrument . As I slowly proceeded he was relaying directions to me from the gunner. It was all going well. All I could see was the sunflowers getting knocked down by the front bumper.
The van suddenly stopped as I dropped the front wheels into a huge ravine. All I saw through the windshield was a tumbling ball of blue levis and white t-shirt flying forward from the top of the van. I was pretty sure I had just killed my tail chain.
It took a few moments for me to find him...unconscious and bleeding from a thousand little scratches on him from the broken sunflower stalks. His t-shirt was almost torn to pieces. As I knelt down I could see he was breathing, thank God.
He didn't come to until I had him laying on the top bank. He was holding his arms across his belly in pain. I thought he had broken his ribs. After contacting the other crew on the radio and a quick trip to a not-so-close ER it was determined he had broken both wrists attempting to fend off his impact. He couldn't remember a thing.
A few days later the contractor had some equipment out there to clear line. I never lived that one down...ruined a good hand for a month and damned near got fired. Not to mention the tow charge to drag the van out of that ravine.
That is an awful story.
Just goes to show that Paden Cash will tell about his screw ups as well as his successes.
I think I would try and lose that memory as quickly as possible.
I was staking some clearing lines for a new rail loading facility at Fort Campbell back in about 2000, and one was about 1/2 mile long through a section of woods that had just been logged. No walking or seeing through it, so I got the contractor to send a D8 to help. I set the robot up on one end that was out in an open field, set some painted stakes on line heading into the woods, and told the operator to line up with them. As he progressed, I would set more stakes behind him, and keep moving the robot up to the high spots to see into the valleys. He consistently kept veering off, and I would have to go show him where line was. I finally got on the dozer with him and gave direction. Turned out, he was blind in one eye, and couldn't see well enough out of the other to stay on a straight line.
Out here some say ranchers don't really sell cattle, they sell grass and cattle process it.
Not far from here there are pastures that struggle to support 1 cow per 30-40 acres.
The pic I posted isn't one of those areas.
really disorientating driving through that stuff, never knowing what's under the 4-wheeler
Terrifying.
@paden-cash good story. Hard to click the “thumbs up” button, though.
We mowed down two rows of tall corn yesterday with our Gator XUV, after we got the minimal crop damage waiver signed by the sellers.
I figured that was safer than mowing down the tall weeds because at least the farmer and tractor had been down these rows safely before.
That is an awful story.
Just goes to show that Paden Cash will tell about his screw ups as well as his successes.
I think I would try and lose that memory as quickly as possible.
That is an awful story..and I wish I could lose the memory.
The guy's name was Robert. He was as good-natured about the whole thing as I guess he could've been. I remember the boss wanted to keep him as happy as possible during his recovery (with both wrists in casts). He kept him on the clock and paid his medical bills.
The trouble was there is very little that a guy can do with both hands nearly immobilized. I remember he got pretty good at running prints on the blue-line machine and he could use various calculators with his fingers protruding from the casts.
He eventually recovered and returned to my crew. He turned out to be one of the best instrument operators I ever had. He probably got sick of me apologizing for the mishap.
The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) became available to farmers about 1987 or so. Millions of acres of low production farmland was planted to grass and ignored. Some places grew certain types of grass seven and eight feet tall. No matter how slowly you drove through it, you knew something was going to jump up and bite you sooner or later. One day the left front wheel went DOWN and my helper sort of flew across the pickup seat to give me a kiss, then the left front shot back up for a second, sending him halfway back to where he came from, then the left rear wheel went DOWN, got a second kiss, then it came back up as I finally rocked to a stop and threw him down on the passenger floor area, sort of. We crawled out and carefully pulled ourselves to the rear of the pickup to see what had happened. There was a dish-shaped hole about six feet across and two feet deep with a gas pipe sticking up. Some fool had dug down to cap it off, then neglected to back fill the hole before the field got seeded to a variety of native grasses.
Drove even slower to where we were headed. Hitting that with a four-wheeler at significant speed could have been VERY bad.
Did he invite you to follow him into the crapper to take care of certain duties involving TP?
Did he invite you to follow him into the crapper to take care of certain duties involving TP?
That was the running joke during his recovery. Lots of jokes about things his wife had to help out with also. I remember one wrist cast wasn't as limiting as the other and apparently gave him enough latitude to function in a limited manner. I never really asked though... 😉
@mightymoe so true. I can on average run 2.5 head per acre. Now thats paying attention etc. i have ran 4 head per acre with daily moves on a below average year but that’s moving the herd daily and grazing 300 days hay the other 60 days. Back working full time i can’t do that as i don’t have the time to be on site daily watching the herd etc.
