Moving hay in the snow

It is good to have a tractor to move hay.  I think back to last year and the deep snow and the struggles using my pickup to pull a hay bale through deep snow.  Much easier to move bales with a tractor.

First I put the bucket on the loader and pushed snow away for a path.  I was able to easily drive through the deep snow but I decided not to do so when carrying a large heavy hay bale.  Plus I wanted to make a wide path for the cattle to walk.  Earlier they had made a single file path through the deep snow but I found that when we shared the path I was the one who had to get off and walk through the deep snow to get past a cow.

I also cleared an area for the new bale and feeder and tried to make it large enough so the cattle could also lay nearby on the ground and not in the deep snow.  And I made a path to the river for the cattle.

This was practice for my scraping snow using the tractor's bucket.  It can be too easy to gouge the ground and I need practice where a gouge doesn't matter much.

The bales somewhat block the view when carrying them.

Next year I will clean out the hay shed so I can store the bales in there and not have to scrape snow off them before feeding them to cattle.


Later I noticed animal tracks in the path I had cleared from the hay bales to the yard.  In the time I had cleared a path out to the pasture some animal went from the hay bales to the yard over my newly created path.  It wasn't Daisy as she was inside the house.  The tracks didn't look to be a dog's tracks either.  I don't what animal it was but it looked to be some sort of animal the size of Daisy or a small dog.