Small Farm Operation Makes Do With "Mini Tools"

Small Farm Operation Makes Do With "Mini Tools" MISCELLANEOUS EQUIPMENT Miscellaneous 27-6-35 Wendy Pasman says she and her husband, Art, can't justify the cost of big equipment to produce feed for their small flock of dairy goats and Shetland sheep, but still have to cut and store forage for them, and maintain their fields. So they do everything with mini-size tools, some of which they built themselves. Their primary tractor is a Deere 111 garden tractor. "The tractor runs almost every day, summer and winter," she says. To handle all the fieldwork with the 111, the Pasmans made or adapted a number of machines. They cut hay with a walk-behind 34-in. sickle mower. A year ago, she found a small wheel rake at a farm sale and adapted that for raking hay. "It was made for raking lawn clippings, so we had to strengthen it to work in heavier material," she says. They haul loose hay in from the field in a hayrack made to fit on a two-wheeled trailer frame welded together by Art and their son. "We use it so much I just made a new bottom and sides for it," she says. "I have hay rack sides for it that fit on the sides, front and back. It's lower in the back to make it easier to pitch the hay on, but it will handle a big load of hay." Pasman says they can't always count on good hay drying weather, so she devised an alternative system that lets her bag wet hay to make silage. It consists of a rolling platform fitted with a wire panel that's bent into a circle. "I hang the biggest black plastic trash bags I can buy on the wire, which holds the bags open and supports them while we pitch in the wet hay," she explains. "When we pack the bag as full as we can, I tie the end shut with baler twine and then haul the bag from the field on the cart." This is her first year at making silage this way, but she says the heavy plastic bags she's using have resisted puncturing and the material inside has the appearance and smell of good quality silage. When they need to work the soil, they have an old horse-drawn cultivator that works quite well as a small chisel plow. All they had to do was devise a hitch so they could pull it with the 111. They break up clods with a small spike-toothed harrow. Then they seed and fertilize with a lawn spreader they adapted to pull it behind the tractor. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Wendy Pasman, RR 3, Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, Canada T4T 2A3 (ph 403 845-6121).

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