When The Tractor Gets Stuck

The other day when I had bought my new gun, Patrick and I were going to go out and shoot it to test it out. Right before we left the house, grandpa called and said the tractor had gotten stuck. This is not just any tractor, but our BIG tractor. The only things we use this tractor for is to plant our seed in the spring. And when this sucker gets stuck, it's usually a big deal.

We drove over to the field to find this:

If you're lucky, you can pull the whole setup out without having to unhook the air seeder cart from the tractor.

Welp, we weren't so lucky. We tried and tried, and the tractor just got more stuck.

So, we had to unhook. Once we unhook from the air seeder, we have to concentrate on getting the big tractor unstuck. This part went well thank goodness.

Look at the size of the hole from the tires! If I were to climb in there, it would be about waist-deep on me. 

But then the bad part comes. There's really no great way to lift the hitch on the front of the air seeder off of the ground, so you pretty much have to drag the front of it through the dirt and mud until you get to dry ground. We made a boo boo and accidentally put a hole in one of the hydraulic lines, so we have to now fix that before we can start seeding again.

After you get both pieces of machinery out of the mud and into dry ground, you have to jack the front of the air seeder up. This is no easy task, as a full grain cart means the whole setup weighs about 24,000 pounds. Since Patrick is the youngest and strongest, he is the lucky one that gets to push the jack down every time.

Three generations of confused farmers trying to figure out what the heck they're doing:

After you jack it up so far, you put wood blocks underneath it to keep it raised up since the jack only has so much space to move up. Once you reset it, you just keep jacking it up until it gets even with the hitch on the back of the trailer.

Thankfully nothing else went wrong. All in all, this was about a two hour process to get everything pulled out of the mud, moved and hooked back up. And I'll tell you what...it makes for some cranky farmers!

Hope everyone has a happy Monday!