Well, it was one of those farm mornings where a simple task ended up taking half the day.  I had ordered four pallets of rock phosphate from Peaceful Valley, and they had arrived at the freight terminal in Eureka.  If I had a forklift, I could’ve had them dropped off right at the farm, but without a way to unload them from a tractor-trailer, I needed the folks at the terminal to load them onto a flat bed trailer that I could drive onto my farm.

So I borrowed a trailer from a friend, drove to the terminal, got loaded up, and got back to the farm.  The ground here is still a bit wet, so I knew there was a risk of getting stuck… but I needed to get 8000 lbs of phosphate back into my farm, not just to the front gate.  So I put my truck in four-low and gave it a go…

...and I got stuck.  My fall-back plan was to use my tractor to pull the truck and trailer through the gate, but because of the angle my truck was stuck in, the trailer wasn’t fitting through.  So I unhooked the trailer, and pulled my truck away.  In order to hitch up to my tractor, I needed to remove the tiller, and switch hitch balls.  So I did this, got the trailer where I wanted it - but then I still needed the tractor free to offload the pallets!  Once again, I switch the trailer back onto the truck and move into position.

Then it was a matter of lifting heavy pallets off the trailer without forks.  I used heavy straps and lifted with the bucket of my tractor (a bit sketchy?), and finally the job was done.

Would it have been faster just to offload that stuff by hand?  Maybe.  But really it just made me wish I had a forklift!