The Blockas have a small Holstein herd by today’s standards, just 100 cows, but it’s laid the groundwork for building a herd of 100 commercial Angus cattle and a farm base of 4,800 acres. “The dairy is what’s built the farm, mainly because it was a steady cash flow,” says Don.

The farm has 3,600 acres of crops plus 1,200 acres of hay and pasture. The Blockas grow hard red spring wheat, malt barley, feed barley, canola, oats, and feed peas, and have dabbled in canary seed and flax.

---

A favorite workhorse

The Blocka family: Tim, Leonard, Linda, Verna and Don.

On any given day, someone in the family will be using their favorite workhorse – a New Holland TV140 Bidirectional tractor. Don recalls life before the first Bidirectional came to the farm over 10 years ago. He says, “After we got a Bidirectional tractor, we wondered how we had farmed without it! This tractor runs virtually every day. When you want a chore tractor, that’s the one you grab.” The list of chores covers just about everything you could ask a tractor to do, from delivering the feed wagon to their herds, to cutting hay and making bales, hauling feedbags or carrying square bales to the barn, or round bales to the feeder.

Don thinks of the TV140 as much more than a tractor. He says it has the quick response of a forklift, the power of a payloader and the endurance required for 12-hour field operations when it’s time to make hay.

“There isn’t anything we don’t seem to use it for lifting, and it’s got a very good turning radius. You can operate all the hydraulics with your feet, and your hands are free to operate the hydrostatic. You’re not playing with loader controls and things like that. That’s what I like the most.”

---

Summer chores

Most of the summer, when the TV140 isn’t in the farmyard, it’s likely to be in one of the fields pulling haytools or loading round bales. The hydrostatic transmission makes it ideal for variable speed, forward-reverse-forward maneuvers.

“It’s so quick to get in and out, because you’re not shifting gears,” he says. “You can often make a two-man job into a one-man job because of its versatility.”

Sometimes, says Don, they use the bucket to dig a hole, or open a ditch for drainage or collect a pile of dead brush. Sometimes they use it to push a new fencepost into the ground. Sometimes they use it for extra reach to rescue a calf that’s stuck in a mud hole.

“We love having it around. Once you get one, I don’t think you’d ever want to go back,” Don says.

Trade-in values for the Bidirectional tractors have been good, and when the time comes, Don says, he’ll trade for another one. Their current TV140, which arrived in the fall of 2002, replaced a unit that had about 3,000 hours on it. He notes, “They do hold their value very well. I can’t complain. We got a good dollar for every trade we’ve done.”

Don admits, however, there is one problem. “We have several people who operate it, and any one of us might be using it. Somebody’s always looking for it!”