Straight truck for cattle

[hillbilly beef man]

There is a reason that straight trucks went out of favor. We had a 1980 F-350 351 4 speed 2wd with a 12 ft bed when I was growing up. On a couple of places we owned we had a wood or concrete ramp. Using a truck was not bad at those places. At the leased farms with no ramps we had to get creative. I have put down square bales for them to step up on, I have piled up dirt, I have even dug holes for the rear tires to drop into to get the truck low enough to load. I have even stacked up locust fence posts for a ramp. None of these tricks worked espically well.

With a trailer loading is a piece of cake anywhere regardless of facilities. The only advantage the truck had over a trailer was it did go better in mud, but that is what the tow hooks on the front of pickups are for.

 

[farmerjan]

We had a 1953 Dodge 2 ton truck with a floor starter that I used to haul all the pigs and calves in. Probably a 12 foot bed with racks.... Loved to drive that truck. But you had to have a loading ramp that you could back up to and with so many places that we rent, a trailer and portable corral panels makes it much easier to just set up a pen and get them in. See some of the old loading ramps at some of the pastures but mostly they have fallen into disrepair. Our closest stockyard has 2 trailer docks, one on the lower side and one on the upper side; but they only use one, partly due to the way they run cattle out of the ring and pen them and shortage of help. I remember when I first moved to Va 35 yrs ago, I was one of only 2 or 3 that used a horse trailer (mine was a 4 horse that had been converted to haul oxen) and only a very occasional farmer had a trailer. They had trucks that the sides would come off, or drop the top part of the racks down the side, so the truck could be used for other hauling jobs. There are still several with straight trucks that haul cattle from the bigger farms, and all the semis load out of the docks still.

 

[northcreek]

When I was a kid we would haul in the back of a 65 ford 1/2 ton truck if we just had a few to haul. If we had several we had a guy that would haul them in a larger truck with a wooden cage built. I feel like our cattle are a lot larger than they used to be too.