14 unique gift ideas for cattle farmers

Picture Credit score: Better Tripp Moving & Storage, Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Searching for some nice reward concepts for the cattle farmer in your vacation buying checklist?

Listed below are 14 of my private suggestions for essentially the most sensible and helpful cattle farming instruments to make farm life simpler and extra gratifying for the cattle farmer in your Christmas checklist.

(Disclosure: I get commissions for purchases made utilizing Amazon hyperlinks in my put up.)

1. Electrical fence tester and fault finder

An excellent fence testing software must show extra than simply voltage and present. It also needs to have a short-finder operate to avoid wasting you hours of time when looking for issues in a big electrical fence grid. An excellent fault finder will level you in the fitting route that will help you monitor down all of the little issues that drain energy from a fence, like a random nail touching the wire, a stray wire touching the fence, a moist department or tall grass shorting out the present. If the cattle farmer in your reward checklist makes use of electrical fences and does not but personal a excessive finish fault finder, this reward thought is bound to be a success! 

Right here is my best choice for electrical fence fault-finders on Amazon.com:

2. Cattle ranching books

How about including one in every of these incredible cattle farming books to your farmer’s library?

	Whether or not you might be searching for a farmer that is new to cattle farming, in search of a extra environment friendly approach to handle their established cattle ranch, or contemplating switching to grass fed beef and direct advertising and marketing, this ebook will likely be a fantastic match! And I am its writer, so this web site offers a direct approach to keep in contact, ask questions, and construct on the data and expertise taught in my ebook. Try Grass-Fed Cattle: how to produce and market natural beef#CommissionsEarned on Amazon.com.
	How to Not go Broke Ranching: Things I Learned the Hard Way in Fifty Years of Ranching#CommissionsEarned is a light-hearted, typically humorous, and totally gratifying ebook by a multi-generational cattle rancher making an attempt to forestall individuals from having to make all the identical errors he made throughout fifty+ years of ranching. Extremely really useful!
	This ebook + a herd of cattle = 100’s of hours of enjoyable! Moving ‘Em: a guide to low stress animal handling#CommissionsEarned is one in every of my all-time favourite cattle farming books. It’s packed stuffed with cow psychology and low-stress dealing with strategies that make shifting cattle a lot simpler and far more enjoyable!
	These tales from Canada’s wild Chilcotin area are a number of the most entertaining ranching tales ever written. I have been a fan of writer Paul St. Pierre’s tales since I used to be a child. After I want a great chuckle till my ribs harm, I choose up one in every of his books. Anybody who has ever labored on a ranch or owned cattle will respect the dry humor and ornery characters packed into Smith And Other Events#CommissionsEarned.

You may see extra of my favourite cattle farming books here.

3. The Farming Sport

Begin with some debt and 20 acres of land. Then leverage your approach to monetary freedom by shopping for extra cattle, fruit, grain, and hay acreage whereas maneuvering by way of harvests which can be continually interrupted by surprises from the feed firm, pests, parasites, the climate, and the IRS. The Farming Sport is a household favourite in our family; we play this recreation extra typically than Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, and Carcassonne mixed! Sport time is round 2 hours and the way in which the sport unfolds is rarely the identical! 

Try The Farming Game^{#CommissionsEarned} on amazon.com

4. Shoe-in overshoes

Shoe-in overshoes^{#CommissionsEarned} need to be one of many best innovations each made for farmers who’re continually popping into the home to seize one thing from the farm workplace, raid the fridge, or warmth some milk for a new child calf. Taking off laced-up boots each time is an actual ache within the butt. We hold a number of pair of overshoes in varied sizes by our entrance door always. A number of sizes are essential – further massive to suit over cumbersome winter boots, considerably smaller to accommodate leather-based work boots with out flopping far and wide. And in case your family has stairs, ensure that they’ve a closed toe design so the mud and cow manure does not get smeared all around the stair risers.

5. Magnetic wrist band

Whether or not it is screws, nails, fencing stables, or crimp-on metallic ear tags for calves, farmers continually want a approach to quickly retailer unfastened odds and ends. A magnetic wrist band^{#CommissionsEarned} is much more handy, safer, and cleaner than holding any of these items together with your enamel!

6. Slip-on ice crampons

Whether or not you are strolling by way of semi-frozen calving pens or just navigating an icy farm yard, a set of slip-on ice crampons is an absolute lifesaver. They’re fairly widespread in shops these days, however as all the time, offers on slip-on crampons on Amazon^{#CommissionsEarned} are exhausting to beat.

7. Leatherman multi-tool

Talking of useful instruments that make a farmer’s life simpler, you possibly can’t go improper with a multi-tool. Whereas some options, like scissors, simply add weight and pointless fluff, there are a number of options which can be important to a cattle farmer:

• Needlenose pliers with wire-cutter (unfastened joint or spring-loaded for simple one-handed use). It is usually important that the multi-tool may be flipped open to entry the pliers with one hand. 
• Easy-edged knife blade that may be simply re-sharped.
• Serrated knife (good to have, however non-compulsory)
• Noticed blade
• Metallic/Wooden File
• Ruler (you haven’t any thought how typically I take advantage of mine!)
• Phillips head screw driver
• 2 sizes of slot-head screw driver
• Sturdy pouch for carrying on a belt

My stand-out favourite is the Leatherman Supertool 300^{#CommissionsEarned}. My 1st era Supertool continues to be going sturdy after 20 years regardless of all of the occasions its been dropped, stepped on, and shorted out in electrical circuits.

8. Smartphone bracket for truck / tractor

Each cattle truck and tractor (that has a cab) needs to be geared up with one in every of these to permit for hands-free calling, GPS navigation, and music group when the telephone is paired to the stereo. It will assist make the lengthy hours behind the wheel extra bearable and retains your palms the place they must be on the steering wheel. I have been utilizing the iOttie One Touch 2 Car Mount Holder^{#CommissionsEarned} for over a 12 months now and it has been stable as a rock, with all of the adjustment choices to get the telephone arrange excellent.

9. Movement-triggered wildlife digicam

From monitoring cattle habits at a water trough to figuring out predators and trespassers, a motion-triggered wildlife digicam is a tremendously great tool to have on a cattle farm. A less complicated model, like this Bushnell Trail Camera with Night Vision^{#CommissionsEarned}, even allows you to see what is going on on at midnight. However you possibly can additionally spring for one with its personal sim card, like this Bushnell Trophy Cam HD^{#CommissionsEarned}, so you may get your wildlife digicam to ship you pictures at set intervals, permitting you to remotely monitor water troughs, feed bunks, and pastures out of your telephone! 

10. Headlamp

An excellent headlamp is an absolute should on a cattle farm as a result of it retains palms free to take care of gates, cattle, and instruments.  Mine lives in my jacket pocket all winter lengthy. A farmer’s headlamp needs to be sufficiently small to suit comfortably in a jacket pocket, be glove-friendly, waterproof, rechargeable, and have each flood and beam choices. The brand new Petzl Tactikka+ headlamp^{#CommissionsEarned} has a cool new characteristic that I discover notably helpful – the sunshine may be switched from white to pink so you possibly can protect your night time imaginative and prescient (very helpful in calving pens and when working round cattle at night time).

11. Weigh bars for squeeze chute

Any farmer planning on direct-marketing their beef wants a weigh scale for weighing their cattle previous to sending them for slaughter. It is the one means to make sure that the cattle have truly reached their goal slaughter weight and are fats sufficient to provide tender flavorful beef. The best resolution is to mount a set of weigh bars or load cells beneath the prevailing cattle squeeze. Though that is the costliest reward thought on this checklist, it will make an especially helpful reward if you happen to pool your cash with a number of different individuals buying for a similar cattle farmer. This is the hyperlink to cattle weigh bars^{#CommissionsEarned} on Amazon.com

12. ATV deal with bar heaters

With the period of time cattle farmers spend on their ATV’s every single day, a pleasant set of ATV handlebar warmers^{#CommissionsEarned} is bound to make their winter much more gratifying. Mix them with a set of handlebar mitts^{#CommissionsEarned} to dam wind and moisture whereas on the go and you’ve got a successful mixture to place a smile on the face of your farmer!

13. Sprint digicam for the cattle truck

A dashboard digicam that routinely data the whole lot you see by way of the windshield of your farm truck is among the finest (and most cost-effective) insurance coverage insurance policies you possibly can presumably need to show your innocence to the insurance coverage firm in case of an accident. (Posting different individuals’s driving errors on Youtube can be enjoyable). And simply realizing there is a digicam operating has the additional advantage of enhancing the driving expertise of whoever is driving the car. I do know my driving has improved significantly since I’ve put in one in every of these! I’ve been utilizing the G1W dashcam from Amazon for nearly 2 years and am very proud of it. It is successor, the G1W-CB dashcam^{#CommissionsEarned}, is even higher. You may additionally want a 32GB microSD card^{#CommissionsEarned} to go together with it. Extremely really useful!

14. Soil Probe

An excellent soil probe for taking soil analyses within the pastures needs to be a part of each cattle farmer’s toolbox. Just be sure you get a nickel-plated soil recovery probe^{#CommissionsEarned}, NOT one made from galvanized metal (it’s going to contaminate the pattern with zinc) or another metallic alloy. Nickel isn’t one of many components included in soil evaluation exams so a nickel-plated probe will not contaminate the outcomes. 

I hope this checklist has given you some distinctive reward concepts for the cattle farmer in your buying checklist! When you have another nice vacation reward concepts for farmers, please share them within the feedback part under!

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