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New local product helps ranchers protect wheel lines

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POST CREEK — Winter weather is hard on animals and farming equipment, but that’s not all ranchers have to worry about during the cold months. Animals, cattle in particular, can be destructive of equipment like wheel lines when they’re kept in the same pasture.

“They bend (the wheel lines) up; they wreck them,” explained Jake Wadsworth of Wadsworth Manufacturing, a small company outside of St. Ignatius that makes farm and ranch equipment. “It’s actually a problem everybody around here has.”

There are typically 33 wheels and as many sprinklers on a wheel line, Wadsworth said, and replacing damaged “rain birds” — sprinkler heads — can be pricey at $20 per sprinkler. It’s an issue most ranchers who irrigate their fields deal with, Lake County MSU Extension Agent Jack Stivers agreed.

“(Wheel lines) are not made to have a 1,200-pound cow rubbing on them,” he explained. “It’s not good for the aluminum structure; it wears it down.”

This fall, Wadsworth and his family decided to put their manufacturing skills to work and start producing a small, inexpensive item that can help ranchers solve the problem of cattle destroying wheel lines. Some ranchers put up electric fences on small posts around their wheel lines, and others use plastic clips to attach electric wire to the wheel line itself, but those are easily broken when cattle bump them. So Wadsworth Manufacturing came up with an alternative: a small insulator made of a thermoplastic elastomer (a rubber-like plastic material) that attaches to the wheel line and holds electric wire in place. 

“This just simplifies it a lot,” Wadsworth said of the insulator.

Often ranchers will use a wheel line as a divider to keep cattle on one side of a field, but keeping the animals away from the makeshift fence can be tricky. That’s where Wadsworth’s insulator comes in.

“A little investment such as that can save some expense,” Stivers said.

As an added bonus, the insulators are made from recycled materials — Wadsworth Manufacturing makes nipples for calf bottles from recycled plastic, and then recycles used nipples to make the insulators. The insulators are adjustable to fit any wheel, and at around $2 apiece, they won’t break the bank.

“We (Wadsworth's) run about 150 mother cows, and that’s kind of how this got started,” Wadsworth explained. “We needed (the insulators), too.”

In the past couple of months, Wadsworth and his family have produced around 1,200 insulators to be sold in local outlets like Mountain West Co-op in Ronan, Quality Supply in Missoula and Cowpokes' Supply in Victor.

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