Welcome to winter in Saskatchewan in January. It is - 25 to -30 C with a little cut-right-through-the-clothes, wind. Sorry, I don’t like it anymore. Well, I don’t think I ever liked it, but just accepted it as a fact of life and tried to carry on with what I was doing. As I am writing this column it is -34 C and with a wind the weatherman is saying it is – 45 C. Global warming, huh? Bah Humbug.
This cold weather brings back memories of dealing with winter. In earlier days when I was feeding cattle my morning started out with harnessing the team and getting hooked on the rack. Horses were good, they didn’t need boosting to get started but when the horses got old we switched to using the John Deere 4020. There was much boosting, use of heat housings, a good circulating heater, stiff hydraulics and frozen feet. It took less time to feed the cattle with the tractor but more troubles.
We slowly learned how to run a tractor in winter with less troubles. Keep the tractor inside even if it is in an unheated Quonset. A heated shop is better but we never seemed to have one. Use the hottest circulating heater you can buy. Block heaters will not get the motor warm enough. We started out with long narrow batteries. They never were any good and I built a new battery box on the side of the tractor beside the starter. Shorter battery cables less cranking power lost. We bought the squarer, high-cranking amp batteries. Much better.
The old 4020 fed cattle every day in the winter for 23 years. It retired one summer day going down the road to the other place, when the motor slowed down and then stopped. It would not crank and it didn't take a CSI person to figure that one out. I have no idea how many hours were on the motor as the tach had broken on one of those thirty below mornings at least 10 years before.
I should tell you a funny story about the 4020. After the motor seized, I phoned up a friend, Earl Jones, who ran a wrecking yard south of Battleford. I had bought numerous parts from him in the past. I told him my dilemma, was asking about fixing it and was asking about a 4020 motor. I asked him if he would buy it. Earl said he might, but wanted to know what was on it. I told him it had an aftermarket cab and a frontend loader. Earl said, “Is it a 46A loader?” I said, “Yes”. Earl said, “Does it have more than 10 pounds of welding rod on it?” I said, “Yes.” Earl said, “I will pay you $2,500.” I said, “The tractor is yours.” He said, “I will send out a truck for it” and he did. Knowing him like I do, I am sure he had half of it sold before the truck even got there.
In the time I have been on this Earth I have seen the cattle feeding industry move from everything loose to square bales and now round bales. The loose stuff was handballed with a pitch fork onto racks pulled by a team of horses and then hauled to the cattle. It was an everyday job no matter what the weather. When we quit threshing and began combining, we needed a system of handling the straw so father bought a square baler. I rode many a mile on the stooker and stacked and handled countless hundreds of square bales. I do not miss those little square bales. Going to a round baler was a step forward. You can’t move them by hand.
To water the cattle when I was young my father and grandfather had a big rim off an old steam engine. It was six or seven feet across. It was laid down flat with the bottom cemented off. It had a wooden lid on the top and a cast iron tank heater sat inside. We put wood, coal and even had a system of dribbling diesel fuel into it to heat the water. We used to hand pump the water from the well into this rim. It was a long thankless job and unbelievable how much those old cows could drink. Later my father got a pump system from his cousin Ernie that hooked right on the pump shaft where the handle would go. It had a case iron frame and an eccentric that would go up and down, all run with an electric motor. If you let the ice build up too much at the base of the pump, it would break the case iron housing. That, with coaching from Ernie, is how I learned to weld case iron. When we put a watering bowl and a pressure system in, that was a lot better. I was beginning to have to weld on top of the welds I had already made on the old case iron pump jack so the move to the watering bowl was good for me.
Today, the only cattle I have are six Speckled Park purebred cows and son-in-law Roland looks after them. If it is cold I just don’t go outside. I miss having a purpose in life like getting out there in the morning to feed cows. I miss the calves when they come in the spring, full of life and holding drag races across the field. I like to watch the calves grow throughout the summer. I don’t miss calving in bad weather. I don’t miss riding a horse and getting off so cold and stiff you can hardly walk or the other part of the season where every horsefly in the country has to have a bite of human flesh before you get done. No, I don’t miss those things.
On the home front, Jaco is working in the shop tying things together to get the 3208 Cat motor into the tandem truck. It has meant many trips to Keranda for bits and pieces. If fittings are different you need pieces to tie them together. The exhaust manifold is different so he had to make a modification to the exhaust to get it around the starter. The temperature sender has to be switched from the dead motor to the new one. The new motor has a return line from the injector, the old motor did not. He had to make fittings in the tank for the return line. This all takes time to sort out. I am hoping to hear the rumble of a Cat engine soon.
In the oil patch almost every day you hear of new lay offs. I find that somewhat sickening. The oil goes down and right away the oil companies start laying off the working people who are trying to make a living. The posturing of the oil companies and governments is nothing short of dishonest. The downturn in this oil price has gone on for only he last quarter of this year. Anybody who knows anything about budgets and taxes will know the big downturn may be coming in 2015, not now. They are still riding on the income from the first three quarters of 2014. Are the oil companies going to lose money at this $54 a barrel price? I don’t know. I don’t know what their costs are but in the past they have had to operate with that kind of a price. To have across-the-board cutbacks like they are doing makes no sense whatsoever. There are projects that may warrant doing, only the oil companies knows. People are still driving, oil is still being used. This low price may not last, it may go up, who knows. I would like to throw a brick at every oil company executive and government official who stands up on their hind legs and mouths the song and dance of big losses in the oil patch. Sing me the song after it has actually has happened.
To those in the oil patch, do not let the recent events get you down. As my Uncle Bill used to say, “and this too shall come to pass,” and it will. When the smoke clears you will find the only thing that really counts is family and friends. The rest is just stuff. Try and have a happy new year.
Joke of the week: At a few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve, a lady in the bar, stood up and said, “We have to be ready. I want all the husbands at the stroke of midnight to go and stand beside the one who made life worth living.” It turned out to be somewhat embarrassing as the bartender was almost crushed to death by the crowd.
