What is the most useful piece of equipment I use on the ranch?
It’s gotta be my Backhoe, yes it surely is my John Deere 310 and I can just feel the environmentalists that know me shudder. They all thought that I was on their side, well if you give me a few paragraphs to explain about all the different tools and grazing animals that I use to steward the V6, I think you will understand my logic. A backhoe on a well-run, environmentally friendly ranch, can be the most effective, cheap tool on the ranch. What other piece of equipment can start in the morning and dig out a spring that produces water 24 hours a day 365 days a year and when captured in a spring box and piped to a watering trough even one gallon per minute will produce 1440 gallons per day and in a year 525,600 gallons for all the critters on the land that need a drink. And don’t forget to put a big rock in the trough for all the insects to get a drink and any other critters that don’t know how to swim, a place to dry off and then leave to continue on with life.
Next, there’s a big dead limb in and old Oak tree that might fall on my barbed wire fence so with the front-end loader on my backhoe I reach up about 12 feet with my clamshell bucket open the jaws then clamp down on the limb give a little pull that breaks the limb loose then take the limb to the ground and I won’t have a fence to fix.
We’ve had some good big rains this year and I have a place on one of the ranch roads where the rain stayed too long on the dirt road and washed away part of the road and the best way to get control of the next time rainwater wants to make matters worse is to install an 18” culvert. So with the bucket down and outriggers down in no time at all, I have a ditch dug across the road then with a chain wrapped around the culvert I lower it into the ditch then with the bucket in a curled position I sweep all the dirt that I just took out back into the trench then compact the dirt over the culvert by pushing down with the bucket. This job by two men with shovels would probably take two days instead of two hours with a backhoe.
Straw bales act as natural erosion control until trees can be established.
Wait, I’m not finished yet. The Little Cholame Creek was subjected to some flooding last January and I want to put a little pressure on the creek on its West side so it won’t wash the now 4-foot-high vertical creek bank anymore. I don’t want to use anything that won’t decompose when it's done. Time to get a 25-ton load of rice straw, 1,000-pound bales, from Northern California to pressure the creek but the truck arrived at almost dark and I couldn’t unload the top tier of bales in the dark as my forks might hit the strings of a bale and break it so I just pushed all fifty 1,000 bales onto the ground and sent a happy trucker on his way. The next morning I loaded ten bales on my flatbed trailer and stacked the rest in the barn. The pictures that are attached to this blog tell how I tickled the creek a little to change its course a tad then when I finish, the last permanent step I will again use a smaller bucket to dig down next to the downhill toe of the rice straw bail and fill with topsoil then plant a Cottonwood tree as the permanent solution to protecting an eroded creek bank. There are many more backhoe uses that make the land better and more Mother Nature friendly so John Deere 310 Backhoe you’re number one on my hit parade. So to all of you doubting me, it’s not whether to use it but how to use it.
See Ya,
Jack