I was out spreading manure this past weekend, and on one of my last runs late Sunday evening, the beaters (or paddles) on the back of the spreader started flinging all kinds of wet poo towards the cab. I was looking back through the rear window, keeping an eye on the manure load as it was being flung out, when the window started getting covered — splat! splat! splat!
Typically, the spreader flings the manure backward and out of the spreader behind you as you drive. It's not supposed to fling it forward. But somehow towards the very end of the load there was a section of old hay and manure sliding down the floor of the spreader towards the beaters … and it was low enough to catch the bottom of the beaters as they spun around, but not high enough to have the top of the beaters catch it and fling it out backwards. So there I was, watching (and listening) to the splattering of all this poo hitting the window and instinctively ducking as each blob smacked against it. I was thinking, thank heavens we have a tractor with a cab on it!
Back in the old days, we had a smaller John Deere tractor with no cab and a smaller ground-driven manure spreader. Because it was ground-driven, i.e., operated at the speed we were pulling it, versus the PTO-driven spreader we now have (powered by the tractor's engine and operating at much higher speed), you were less likely to get hit with poo or other debris, though I do remember it happening just a bit too often!
You can see in this next shot that it's a long way from the beaters in the back of the spreader to that tractor window:
The good news is, one corral finished. The bad news: three more to go!
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