When we bought the Mahindra it came with a bucket but it also had pallet forks. The tractor once lived at a golf course so there was much need for these pallet forks to move chemicals and the like around. In fact, we left the pallet forks laying around up near the house and didn’t even take them to the farm until a month ago.

Truth be told I couldn’t have cared less about these forks. What would we use pallet forks for on a farm? Maybe a stray hay bale or two… but certainly they would just stay somewhere tucked in the pasture until they rusted away.

Boy, was I wrong.

Those tractor forks are more useful than the bucket. After cutting and the slow tedious process of hauling pecan limbs to the original big burn pile by hand, using both Mike’s truck and the side by side Mahindra, I am in awe of how fast we can get this done with the tractor and the pallet forks. Cutting and breaking down a hole tree in 20 to 30 minutes is easy,.

Not only can I haul a pile of brush that is stacked to the new pile down by the pond, I can lift whole trees up for the guys to cut it into stacks for the woodpile.

So here Brett fells the tree.

And then I zip the tractor around and lift the tree up off the ground so they can cut with the saws. It makes for really easy work and we let the tractor and forks do the heavy lifting. They don’t have to worry about hauling that big tree anywhere, they can cut in place.

The best thing about it is that it makes it safer for them. With the tree cradled safely in the forks and the forks up to keep it from rolling out, they can cut right through without binding the saw. The only thing we have to watch is that one of those cut pieces can drop on your toe and that can really hurt!

You can see the result of all the wood we’ve cut and hauled to the woodpile on this blog post.