Pulling Posts

There is an old fence on the eastern border of The Farm.  I've wanted to replace it with something newer, but haven't done much with it so far.  Part of the delay has been my reluctance to take on the manual post removal job.  I mean, have you ever tried to dig out an old fence post?  And, there were more than thirty of them.  I was imagining buckets of sweat.  On the other hand, farmers remove fences all the time, and they do it without any sweat at all, using a bucket loader on the tractor.  I thought maybe there was something to that, so yesterday I rigged up a system using the Chev, a piece of choker cable, and an old chunk of telephone pole.  One end of the cable went around the base of the post, the other attached to the trailer hitch on the Chev, and in between I put the telephone pole.  The pole was tilted against the fence post such that, as the cable pulled tight, the pole rocked towards the vertical, exerting an upward pull on the base of the post.  It took me a few minutes to fix the system on my test post.  When I got in the Chev, I didn't even use the throttle, I just let the idling motor pull forward.  Pop.  Out came the post.  Wow.  First try.  That never happens to me.  My work-saving ideas generally succeed only about half-way, leaving me to sweat, and swear, and kick at it for the rest of the day.  In a couple of hours, I probably pulled 20 posts.  Not every one of them was as successful as my test post, and I needed four-wheel drive for a couple of them, but I saved myself several days (weeks?) of labor.  There are about 15 left to remove, but I no longer fear them.