Pleasant Surprise

Jason and I had a pleasant surprise today. We put our very old, but new to us, manure spreader to work. We killed our prior manure spreader which was also very old, but it lasted several years so we really can’t complain. This one however is even older than the spreader it is replacing so we were seriously wondering if it would actually work.

43 loads later it seems to be working fine. Jason has taken a lot of ribbing from anyone who has seen our “new” manure spreader parked at the farm the last couple of weeks. Pretty much everyone had their doubts as to whether or not it would work when it was actually under load. Jason was loading the spreader with the tractor today and I was driving the truck pulling the spreader. My instructions were to drive “as slow as possible and still be moving” as I went to spread the first load.

The first run was successful, as was the second one and the third one. When we were on load number ten or so we started to relax a little bit. By the time we were on load number 43 we were well past worrying about whether our museum piece would work and were pretty sick of anything to do with the manure spreader.

We have a lot more than 43 loads to go (it is amazing how much wasted hay and manure can collect over 4 short months) so I guess we’ll get to repeat the cycle of wondering if it is going to work several more times. You never know, load number 44 may be the one that kills it.

Jason says our “new” John Deere manure spreader was made in the 1950’s!!