I'm sure we've all done it.
My father fed the cows alone. He had a hand throttle on the 63 Chevy pickup, he'd use a tarpstrap on the steering wheel put in superlow, get out the door, get on the box, and string out the bales, and get back in before the driverless pickup hit a fence.

did it many times with both a tractor and a pickup. Was just part of day to day life on the farm.

I didn't know there was any other way to do it.

and run back to the rig to turn the wheel back straight every time you hit a rut that pulls the front wheels one way or the other.....

That's what kids are for!

Starting at about age 6.

And city folks wonder how farm and ranch kids learn to drive at such young ages...

Granny low, no throttle, and my under 5 year old self standing in the front seat thinking I was driving while dad fed hay. Dad's 80 this year and has been using a bale bed pickup for the last 15+ years running 200+ cows still mostly by himself. I help when I can these days, but work keeps me pretty busy. At least he isn't running 500 cows anymore. Mom would like him to retire completely, but I know that would kill him.

Dad fed small round bales of hay with an 8N Ford and a 2 wheel lowboy. Had chains for the tractor, and he could resort to a 3-point mounted carry-all box if the snow or mud was to deep to pull the trailer. 10 bales of hay left the front end pretty light.

When it was below zero cold the 8N could balk at starting. Dad would hitch Tom & Dick (they had enough Percheron blood to weigh 1300 lbs or so) to a sled or wagon to feed. The cows got a few buckets of ear corn that we would break into bite size chunks over 4 X 4 board at the crib.

He had me get off and run beside the sled sometimes to keep from getting too cold. Sticking your overshoe toes into a fresh cowpie was another quick warm up.

When it was really bad weather he always kept a stack of hay next to the pasture fence that we could throw bales over and spread out and not bother with the tractor or horses.

The new 2wd '68 F-100 was quite the luxury-mud tires and v-bar chains it went pretty good.

I fed our rodeo herd of about 25 head a few times by my lonesome.

I’ve loaded square bales out of the field in my toyoty pu by myself a lot of times.

Load a bale or two and run up for course correction. Repeat.

Now that was a good workout.

This
.. about about 12-14 doing it all by theirselfs

You guys must be talking about feeding beef cows. In my youth we had dairy cows and I could feed them alone by hitting the switch on the silo unloader and bunk feeder. The most labor involved was unloading the feed cart in the dairy barn.

I steered a B John Deere between the rows of hay bales when I was 4 or 5, with my Dad or uncle right there. Raking and mowing hay on an 8N by the age of 9 or 10. Driving pickup by myself around the farm by 12.

I took my drivers license test at 16 in our pickup, 4 speed manual transmission. I had practiced a bunch at home. I parallel parked that truck perfectly between the cones with no hesitation.

The examiner was a grouchy old fart that had a reputation for being pretty tough on first time testers. He complimented me on the parallel park-"You did that pretty well." I replied with "I could back a B John Deere and a hay rack in that spot!"

I failed my test. He thought I was a little too cocky about my driving skills...

Exactly.
I don’t recall how old I was, probably 6-7. Dad put the truck in lowest gear (we called it compound) and he would jump out and shovel silage into bunks as I steered the truck parallel to the feed bunks. That was in the late 1950s.

Like, smoke em if you got um. The youngsters are not always around to help.

Yea,They would sit me up on an old International H pulling a flat bed trailer before my legs even reached the petals.My older brotherwould put it in low gear and told me to weave a little bit backand forth along the small squares to to get close to the bales to pick up hay. Milk cows were in the barn all winter so we never fed out side.When the pasture would start givig out in mid July, we hand chopped corn to feed..I had the same job. When that tricycle front end tried to jump a row, it about broke my wrist.

I used to pick up hay bales in the field that way. I'd get the truck started on a row, jump out and run alongside throwing bales into the back. Once I had a bunch in the back. I'd jump in and put it in park, jump in the back and stack the bales and then do it all over again until I had a full truck.

"The good old days!"

The bale beds and hay processors have made life easy.


I can feed 200-300 cows by myself in a few hours. Be even quicker if they weren't in several different locations. How easy is to pull a couple hydraulic controls and have 1500-3600lbs loaded in literally less than a minute.


Caking them is trickier as I prefer to jump on the back and scoop shovel off versus use a flatbed mounted feeder.

Not a big fan off cows running to the pickup with no one able to hit the brake in case a dumbass gets in the road.

Have used a couple of these. One in the bed of the feed pickup, and one on a trailer.

Just pull under the hopper, fill em up, and go feed the cows!

https://tsfeeders.com/truck.html

The one mounted in the pickup had a counter so you knew how much to feed the cows. (Given that you knew how many cows were in the pasture... )

That is the exact make of the feeder we have.

Electric motor that runs a chain drive conveyor and lid flipper mechanism. We have a counter as well, that or count the sound of the lid clanging shut.


I don't like it because you can only haul one bale at a time if it's on the bed. Which of course is fine if you only need one bale otherwise it doubles the trips to the haystack.

That or use two pickups which is a pain in the ass when its really cold.

That's it.

Usually took out both. Pickup one direction, feeder trailer the other.

After a few years that damned conveyor gets too much slack to take up with the adjustment. Had to fix that, and shim it up!

One of my earliest memories is standing with both feet on the clutch of the tractor and pulling myself down using both hands on the steering wheel, and waiting for Dad to come up and take it out of gear. Probably five or six, because he would come get me since I was the only kid not in school yet.....

I grew up in an orchard, and one of the jobs was picking up the cube boxes of apples and bring them to the barn, which we did with a 45 HP Eicher orchard tractor with pallet forks on the three point hitch. Rows were 300 yards, so by the time you got to the last boxes in the row, you were backing up 300 yards, full throttle, hi range reverse, barely looking back. Usually an hour or two after school from September through October, sometimes into November.

Backing on the driving test wasn't much of a challenge.