Reliable S175 Handles Many Jobs on Dairy Farm

Peter (left) and Mike Jetson say they couldn’t operate Jet Farms without their S175 loader.

Tending a herd of 74 milk cows and a similar number of replacement heifers and young stock can involve a lot of work and a lot of time unless—like brothers Mike and Peter Jetson—you have a reliable skid-steer loader to handle the chores.

“How would we work without our Bobcat® S175?”asks Peter. “That’s a really good question. We couldn’t get by without it.”

He and Mike own and operate Jet Farms, near Spring Grove, Minn. Their reliance on Bobcat skid-steer loaders to ease and shorten chore time continues a practice their father started more than 20 years ago when he bought the farm’s first Bobcat skid-steer loader.

The mid-size 46 hp S175, with its vertical lift path and 1,750-lb. rated operating capacity, purchased from Decorah Implement, Decorah, Iowa, is an ideal fit for their dairy operation. “It’s the most logical size for us,” explains Mike. “It’s small enough to maneuver easily inside the barns and it gives us the lift height, reach and lifting capacity we need to load our feed mixer.”

S175

Typically working three or more hours a day, the S175 is used with a variety of Bobcat attachments to save time and labor. They include:

• A bucket to load the feed mixer with corn, corn silage, haylage, cottonseed, protein supplement and small bales of hay.

• Aconstruction/industrial bucket to load manure into the spreader.

• Another bucket, equipped with teeth, for digging tightly-packed haylage out of silage bags and for dressing up waterways, landscaping and other small dirt moving jobs.

• A utility grapple to clean cornstalk and straw bedding from pens and for clearing brush.

• Pallet forks for moving supplies and equipment.

An enclosed cab adds to operator comfort. The heated cab provides plenty of warmth in the winter. The cab door also fends off spills from dripping manure buckets.

The S175’s reliability provides peace of mind. “Our Bobcat loaders have been very dependable,” says Peter. “It’s the one machine we can count on to start each morning.”

“We’ve tested other types of skidsteer loaders,” adds Mike. “But we stay with the Bobcat brand because the engineers keep improving loader performance and comfort and offering the features we need.”