Category: Farm/Country Living

The Fire-Hose Trick for Towing Vehicles

What do you do when your tractor is stuck in the mud and any vehicles that you use to pull it out is likely to get stuck, too? Put the tow vehicle on relatively dry ground and use an extra-long tow strap! We used a hundred-foot coil of old fire hose (1.5″). This stuff is lightweight, immensely strong, and not too inconvenient to use.

Actually, when I say “we,” I mean “my neighbor,” who appeared with two sons and a pickup truck to rescue my tractor. They loaded the pickup with some of my firewood for extra traction, and plucked out my tractor from the mud. It was nicely done! That tractor was dug in so deep that the wheels were grating on pagodas in China.

You can sometimes buy used fire hose on eBay. Presumably your local fire departments have it from time to time when they retire old hoses.

Or, if  you want something that packs down smaller, you buy a long, strong tow strap from Amazon, like this one:


Price War!

We’re dropping our prices this week. There’s no more room in the refrigerator, so we need to drum up some extra sales. Since there are other egg vendors at the Saturday Farmer’s Market, undercutting their cheapest eggs with our cheapest eggs ought to draw in some bargain-conscious customers.

Setting prices is a screwy business. Most farmers are too insecure to do it well, and end up setting their prices too low, increasing the odds that they will fail. Just the concept of, “What’s the right price?” is pretty much an imponderable: a question with so many ramifications that your mind can spin around in tight little circles forever.

So we let our refrigerator set our prices for us. The process is almost entirely brainless. It works like this: If our refrigerator is full of unsold eggs, it’s time to lower prices. If there are tumbleweeds blowing through an empty refrigerator, it’s time to raise prices. That’s all there is to it.

Once you let the prices float, your attention shifts to more important things, namely: “What can I do so customers enthusiastically help to empty my refrigerator in spite of high prices?”

Step One is to have the best eggs ever. Life is way easier if your customers stick to you like glue and spread the news by word-of-mouth because your product is so good.

Step Two is to get people to notice. Let’s face it, eggs have zero mindshare with most people. If your refrigerator is bulging with eggs, one effect of lowering your prices is to draw in some skeptics who wouldn’t try your product at the old price. If your stuff is the best, some of the skeptics will become converts. Sales are the simplest way to move this process along.

Step Three is to scatter instantly grasped indicators of what you are, so people get it. Wearing overalls and a straw hat at the farmers’ market, having pictures of happy hens on green grass, smiling, and not being a jerk to your customers are all good. (Don’t wear clothes that feel too much like a costume, though, unless you like that sort of thing. If you go all stiff and unnatural, it doesn’t help.) People have this range of mental images of what a farmer ought to be. If you happen to fit one of them, flaunt it.

But avoid slickness. If you live on a real farm, slickness tends to be outside your grasp anyway, because everything you own gets muddied, faded, and battered. Customers are aware of this on some level.

Tractor Stuck in the Mud

My tractor is stuck in the mud. Now what? (To skip ahead to how I got it free, read this follow-up posting).

How did I get stuck? Well, I lost some hens to predators. I figured that the thing to do was to fire up the tractor, mow next to the fence while keeping an eye out for game trails through the grass, and then move the fence slightly. It’s just a couple of strands of aluminum fence wire on step-in fence posts, so moving it is easy.

That would deal with the grass that’s shorting out the fence and perform a reconnaissance that might reveal where the predators were coming from. On the tractor, I sit up high enough that I get a better view than if I’m on foot.

Well, keeping my eyes peeled for predator sign meant I wasn’t watching where I was going, and I bogged down in some very soft ground. Now what? When a vehicle is stuck, I pull it free with the tractor. If the tractor is stuck, I got nothin’!

One of my neighbors came by, asking if he could borrow the tractor to pull out his pickup, which is stuck on his own field. He thinks he can borrow a pal’s 4WD tractor and pull out both vehicles. Let’s hope.

As it turns out, the predators were getting through because the feeder wire for the electric fence had burned through. If I’d checked that first, none of this would have happened!

Tires for Rural Use

My 1993 VW Eurovan needs new tires. We had a flat, and while we were changing the tire we took a good look at the ratings printed on the sidewall, and realized that the tires that were on the vehicle when we bought it (a couple of years ago) are inadequate to the load.

We live two miles up a gravel road, and this is hard on our tires. We get a lot more tire damage than we did when living in the city. Whenever possible, we use six-ply commercial tires on our vehicles. And we do this the other way around, too, preferring vehicles for which six-ply commercial tires are available. I ordered a set of appropriate German-made tires, which of course no one has in stock and won’t arrive for a few days. They cost over $200 each. Ouch! This is the penalty I pay for choosing an obscure imported van. Commercial tires for more popular vehicles are cheaper.

We frequently load our vehicles to capacity with feed, so it’s good to have a vehicle with a commercial chassis. We used to have a Ford Taurus station wagon, which went through a surprising number of tie rods and shocks because it’s not designed for that kind of service. Our Isuzu Trooper and VW Eurovan don’t have this problem. Having a commercial chassis doesn’t force you to have a stark, utilitarian commercial vehicle (though that’s not a bad idea). Our Eurovan (designed originally as a commercial van) came in a a seven-passenger semi-RV configuration, with a fold-up table and fold-down bed. It’s great for family outings. Just don’t expect a sedan, minivan, or even an SUV built on a non-commercial chassis to last like the real deal.

We learned the hard way that conventional wisdom is wrong in one area: never overload a pickup truck! Not if you want to end the trip with the same number of wheels that you started with, anyway. A lot of people told us that you can overload a full-sized half-ton pickup to a full ton with no problems, and this quickly chewed up the rear bearings and spat out a rear wheel. Not fun! (Why would anybody make a full-sized half-ton pickup, anyway?)

If It Were Any Fresher, You’d Have to Slap It

Karen butchers chickens the day before the farmers’ market, meaning that the broilers you buy from us have been on ice for no more than a day. Compare this to supermarket chicken, where sell-by dates are about ten days out from the date of butchering.

Also, our broilers are lovingly handled and kept on ice the whole time. No middlemen, no half-trained help. That’s what small businesses and buying locally are all about.

And it doesn’t hurt that they’re the best-tasting broilers in the world, or that we raise them with respect.

Thought you’d like to know.