Heavy Mud

I wrote last week about how rain and weather affects our animals. Without rain we would not have pasture, and with too much rain…some things get out of whack. Pigs have a field day in the mud, cattle get wet feet and chickens wish they were ducks.

Despite the continued rain I was excited for the arrival of our freezer this week. This project has been months in the making and we cannot wait to get inventory organized, storage consolidated and so much more. But first things first, we have to get the freezer here, in place and working. 

At the time of writing this we are two for three on that list.

On Monday morning at 6am I texted the delivery driver who confirmed delivery with me on Friday to ask his ETA. He responded there was a change of plans, and he was not delivering that day, the office would call when they opened at 8. A sign of what was to come.

The office later told me that they discovered a problem when testing the unit over the weekend. A part had malfunctioned and they needed to replace the part. I told them I had a crane scheduled to be there on Wednesday and I was hoping to have the unit there in time so as not to reschedule the crane. They agreed to send it up on Tuesday morning, without the replacement part, and then send a technician up to get the freezer running.

As promised, the freezer arrived at 7 am on Tuesday morning. Roy and his dog Blue unloaded the trailer in about 20 minutes. I had done some internet research on how these trailers work, but to see it in action was pretty cool. Like Inspector Gadget, the cartoon character from my childhood, the trailer could move and tilt in so many ways. Roy could even push a button on his remote that drove the truck forward! 

By tilting the bed, scooting the axle forward and backwards and driving the truck forward, Roy gently set the container in front of the barn. Then he tied down his few odds and ends on the trailer, handed me a piece of paper to sign and he was off to his next stop to pick up a rental.

Gravel pad is ready, the freezer is here, and we are ready for the crane to come. As I prepared dinner that night I paused for a minute and went out onto the porch. A steady and gentle rain was tapping its rhythm on the roof. My lips pursed and I hoped we didn’t get too much rain. 

Morning arrived and it was still raining, our friend the rain gauge told us we had gotten over ½ an inch of rain overnight. As I puttered around the barn simultaneously preparing and waiting for the arrival of the crane, I could tell my optimism in our dry ground was draining away, like the many rivulets of water finding their way downhill. 

When the crane arrived, we took stock of the situation. Doug and Tony, the crane experts, walked around the barn and decided the best place to put the crane was on the side of the barn where the freezer would go. I had some reservations about the mud on that side of the barn, hindsight is 20/20.

Tony drove the crane in next to where the freezer was to go, but it was too close to the freezer site. We could tell the ground was soft and muddy, but we thought we would give it one more try to get the crane positioned properly.

There is a feeling when something really heavy sinks into the mud. The closest thing I can imagine is the feeling you get when you sit down after a long day, maybe you’ve just finished dinner, but haven’t cleaned up the kitchen and you sit down and tell yourself it’s just for a minute. There is a feeling when you relax into the chair, a feeling that somehow getting back up will take a lot of effort. That is what I felt when the front tires of the crane slipped downhill and plowed a deep trench through the sod.

Tony tried valiantly to rock the crane, but even with the differential locked and all four axles turning we were only digging deeper into the ever wetter mud. We tried pulling the crane with our tractor, which is the biggest, strongest machine we have on the farm, and it seemed like a toy truck trying to pull a full hay wagon.

I asked Tony how much the crane weighed. 

Any guesses?

“Oh about ninety thousand pounds, give or take.”

90,000 lbs! That is how much all of the cattle on our farm weigh (about 60 animals right now). That would be 300 pigs ready to slaughter. Or 15,000 chickens! That’s heavy.

We had a load of gravel delivered to see if we could get some more solid material under the tires. After the dump truck dumped his load and left, we wondered if a full dump truck might have the weight to pull us out. So we called a neighbor with a dump truck and he said he happened to have a full load of logs in the truck and he could come over in a few minutes. 

Sure enough Herby Clark and his dump truck pulled all 90,000 lbs of mud and crane back to the solid ground on the west side of the barn. Herby did it all with a nonchalance and a smile. When I asked him what we owed him, he brushed my offer away with a smile and a wink. I pressed him again and he said he would take some bacon, when we had it.

Thank you Herby!

Just in time my friend Adam from Tangleroot Farm showed up to see if we needed help and he jumped right in. With the rigging in place, it took less than 5 minutes to set the freezer in place. Even weighing 10,000 lbs when the freezer was in the air Doug and I could easily turn the freezer from side to side and weave it between the crane and barn onto the gravel pad.

There was one last hiccup to be had. We measured and remeasured to make sure the freezer was in position, and on the last final check I opened the freezer door and found that the freezer was too low and the door hit the concrete pad of the barn and would not open! Ha! After we spent all that time to make it the right height, it was too low.

Adam and I scrounged up a 6×6 and ripped it in half, then used it as blocking under the container to make it sit at just the right elevation. Phew, we called it a day.

Thank you to Roy, Doug, Tony, Adam and Herby for all the help and making this possible. The freezer will allow us to more accurately manage inventory and storage; saving us from the agony of knowing we have more chicken breast in February, it is just a question of which stack of boxes to move.

The freezer will also help us store enough chicken, beef and pork to hopefully keep us from running out! And lastly it will help our work flow to easily go in and out of the freezer from the space where we pack and process our orders.

The first look at opening from the barn directly into the freezer. Yah!