Hah, here I was expecting Mike to actually hit a power pole, but instead listened to him talking about getting fried for almost 19 minutes 😂😂 Glad you didn’t hit anything, buddy 👍

Mike your tractor cab is insulsted around seat, I hit power pole going to fill up in night I was lucky , it fell on wagon, but didn't break,I needed new shorts after that

Mike Mitchell Very good

You can hop or shuffle, whatever you do don't run, walk or otherwise move your feet apart. What will kill you (or make you toasty) in electrical terms is the potential difference between 1 foot and the other if they're spread apart.

Thanks for the safety meeting about power poles.

I walked around a Challenger 2 track a couple years ago that was sitting in the shop, it had been attached to a large grain cart that crossed under a line with the auger up and took a jolt. The mechanics were scratching their head on what to do with it. Insurance had written it off, no salvage yard would take it because it was assumed that every part had taken voltage, engine and transmission had microwelds on every bearing and gear, whatever part of the track that was sitting between the ground and a bogey had pin holes blown through the track, every computer was toast and all of the fuses were blown, so even the wiring harnesses were suspect. Finally on all of the metal components it looked like someone had gone around with a mig welder and randomly made a small spherical bead all over the tractor so all of the large structural castings were suspect. No part of that tractor could be reused, well maybe the plastic body panels and some interior cosmetic components and steel ballast. It was crazy looking at it.

Thanks too all the farmers, Mike great videos 👍👋👌🚜

my old man caught a 10 000V line with the CB antenna on the combine , in the mirror he could see arcs between the rear rims and the ground, combines was fine, it was a Dominator...

Hey Mike From Southwestern ON. Jump as far away as possible keeping both feet together while landing then doing a couple of bunny jumps till you are safely away from the "arch" zone, atleast thats what they trained us in Fire school.

Haha seeding myself and I heard your auto steer kick out and I panicked and hit my resume switch lol

Sask power should supply orange snow fence to put around every power pole 15ft safety’s first

speaking from personal experience, LOOK UP AND LIVE! i was lucky enough to walk away from it spent 8 weeks in hospital and lost a toe from the exit wound on my right foot!

Years ago a local farmer had the booms of a JD Sprayer come in contact with a Sask Power 3 Phase power Line. The main fuse initially blew but unfortunately reset itself after a certain period of time. The main fuse blew for the second time plus later did a reset again. The main fuse again blew for a third time and luckily the farmer was able to jump clear before the fuse reset for the third & final time. 3 of the 4 sprayer tires completely blew and the sprayer was a complete write off. These farmers now are considerably more careful about where the sprayer is positioned when the booms are extended.

We parked our drill today in ND. We're about half done but there's no moisture left and no rain in the forecast for weeks so enough is enough

Had a good friend that was spraying one day, he went to load his sprayer and it was a rear loading sprayer, he touched the power lines and didn’t realize it as soon as he stepped on the ground it fryed him

Excellent point on the sprayers. You don’t realize how dangerous tractors pulling big heavy implements are until you see things like the Goldinger Farms accident. To avoid hitting a Deputy’s Ford Escape when they met on a blind corner, with no shoulder in 1 lane (where the officer was) just straight up a forested hill & an 8 foot drop, shearing off a power pole, in a dual-wheeled JD tractor pulling a cultivator. BOTH he & the officer were amazingly lucky to survive. (4 months ago-@GoldingerFarms)

Awesome and informative video !!! That machine you’re in is nothing short of incredible !! Thanks !

I watched this video and an hour later I went to the gas station and five minutes from my house another farmer took a power pole down and was laying over his cab

You are right with the shuffle. Keep your feet and close together and shuffle them slow

Ive seen it happen Mike. We demoed a new john Deere drill a few years ago and it was a bit higher then the old one, plus the approach was right in the middle of the poles. The drill hit the wire, sparks flew everywhere but the driver stopped in time, and called the appropriate people from the cab of the tractor. The power guys came and lifted the cable and we were off seeding. From what i recall there was minimal damage to both the equipment and the power line but it was a scary thing to witness. Stay safe out there.

Great video Mike good luck seeding and spraying your 2021 crops

I’ve put a live wire across the top of a cotton picker once with no issue but waiting on the power company to come get the wire off the picker. We did back to close to one before and have it ark and set the picker on fire.

Dang! MIKE GOT SKILLS!!!

Hi Mike when you jump off your equipment make sure you land with both feet together and then hop away keeping your feet as close together as possible because the electricity going into the ground is creating basically a power grid in a circular pattern with areas of high voltage and areas of low voltage and you want too land with both feet in the same voltage if one foot is in a high voltage area and one is in a low voltage you become the ground wire and it won’t hurt long. I used too run cranes at a scrap iron recycling center and we had extremely high voltage lines running through the yard into our own substation to feed the automobile shredder I believe we had 4880 volts running into the electrical room for the shredder. I lived a little over a mile from the yard and every morning at 6:00 when they fired the shredder up all the lights in my house would go dim and flicker. A couple other things they told us about the power lines including just the regular wires that run alongside the streets for the houses is as you mentioned they can arc and jump from the wires to the booms of our cranes but even if it doesn’t arc if you are working close to the wires the static electricity can actually make the metal on the cranes become hot and you can receive severe burns if you touch your boom and as you mentioned you don’t want to try to drive out from under the downed wires on your equipment because they will tend to weld themselves to the metal when they arc when they make contact with your equipment. also as you mentioned do not panic whether you are in the cab of your equipment or if you are a bystander we had two guys that used to run a old crane that was mounted on a truck and they used to travel around to different companies and clean up their grounds and driveways with the magnet on the mobile crane one guy drove the truck and the other operated the crane so the crane would swing back and forth until he got everything he could reach with the extendable boom then the truck driver would move to the next area. Then one day they caught a power line they didn’t see and it came down on the crane and the truck driver panicked he jumped out of the truck and was fine but he went running up to the crane and grabbed the doorknob on the crane and it fried him right there and even sadder was the fact that they buried him on the day he was supposed too get married so be careful everyone

Thanks for telling us the date though👍 happy seeding!

Hello Mike, enjoy your videos. a little seed for thought. How about installing a couple insulated guides on top of the hopper trailer. So guide any low hanging wires up over. We use them to move over size loads through roads where there's to many wires to remove. Cheap fix in the name of safety.

Great video and advice as always Mike. I would try to ask the power company to install a LED flashing night lights safety warning in each pole. They are very inexpensive these days and can save lives. Big up the good work as always

Our home place is by a large field. The electric co op after living there for 20 years gave us the option of either they would pay 100 percent to bury the power line from the road or replace the pole. I picked to bury it because I’d feel awful if a farmer was hurt or killed when he caught machinery on our power line.

Thanks for the examples. That would scare me to death. Interesting how 'wagon steering' works. Never heard it called that before. Great video. Saskdutchkid referred to you the other day.

Great video!. And thank you for : "Adiós". 😂😂. "¡Hasta pronto!" from Spain. 🇪🇦🇺🇲

stay safe mike, we need you to feed the world.

Thanks Mike!

Im from Holland and we dont have this kinda power lines but i watched the whole video waiting till you hit the power line.. lol

Hey, at least it's not a Mendaco, that'd munch power poles for giggles, just like it does trees!

A friend of mine died when he hit a power line with his crane. Although the power went off, it came on again when he was climbing down from his cab.

I’ve never been so interested in power poles!!!

What you were talking about with the sprayer boom actually happened here in the Netherlands. A dad was spraying a field with his tractor and trailed sprayer and his 12 year old son was driving with him, when they finished they were folding up their vertical booms and hit a 110.000 volt powerline in the procces. The dad was instantly killed and his son was severly burned and survived. So i completly agree on the fact that they are extremly dangerous.

Power lines can be extremely dangerous and especially as equipment has gotten bigger! I hope everyone heeds your advice. I have seen a live one break in the wind and jump 20 to 30 feet each time it hit the ground and arced. You take care and thanks for the safety lesson.

Thanks Mike, love your videos

Thank you

Guess it would be ill advised to Ride the Drill during power line seeding, that could become a *shocking* experience

Growing up on a farm, I was always told to stay away from the power poles! As a jet pilot, we were hit by lighting a few months ago. The electronic were fine - the engine bearings were not. Arcing across the bearings. Not good. :)

Thank you for the great advice Mike ❤️

Had a guy around here smoke one head on in a quad going 10 plus mph pro tilling. Didnt even know he hit it until he turned around

Omg tough time of it Mike as we say in 🇮🇪 squeaky bum time going around poles 🤔😀😂

Giday. I know this was recorded days ago, looking at your current next 10day weather, your in for some welcoming rain. Hope it doesn't disrupt planting too much! All those poles must be a pain at spraying time!

Great awesome video mike , Mike the power pole guy lmao 😂 , well put

A local farmer to us got hooked on some main lines with is telliehandler, he got out and kept hold of the handle, it blew his right arm and left leg clean off, he is lucky to be still with us.

Please give us more videos brother

thanks for the lesson mike i wil nevver forget it i reali like it when you learn use thinks:)

Haha! Man we got powerlines in alot of our fields! They definitely make life more complicated! Lol you got some massive equipment tho! Kudos to you for excellent maneuvering!!

Stop, Drop and Roll!

Enjoy your videos. I left the farm 31 yrs ago and miss it a lot. Do you guys seed everything every year?.

Never assume the power is off. Some lines don’t have fuses, they have might have reclosers. Which means if there’s a fault on the line it will turn the power back on several times until the fault clears itself

Alrighty here we go!

Mike you really need one of those magnets for you camara so you don’t have to hold it love your videos I am from Denmark and in Denmark you farm is tremendously big I really want to experience something like that thank you for making your videos

Awesome Video!!

Just for educational purposes... The droop of the power cable -any flexible hanging "cable" between two fixed points- is technically a "Catenary".

So Mike, want to get rid of those power lines? Put an old Iowa farmer on one of those seed rigs. Poles will be down by sundown. Signed, An Old Iowa Farmer.

Great video

In the UK they are illegal to go up. All new sprayers have to go outwards.

Great video again Mike. I have a question could you put up some of that orange safety fence and some reflectors around the poles before each seeding season. That way if you’re drill touched the fence you could get stopped before it hit the pole. Just an idea.

i would obligate the power company to put retro reflectors on the poles from all sides and let them paint the ones on headland or places where the line turns in reflective neon colours i

Down here the electric company makes sure our power lines are 50 to 100 feet above the fields. So we dont have to worry about hitting them when we do our field work and planting.

Man I had to laugh my ass off when you talked about jumping out of the cab or burning sorry😅😃

Quite the obstacle course!

my neighbor was spraying one of his fields with his JD 4830 and i was running around moving pivots and i went to turn on the power to them, and i saw a boom try and touch some powerlines, thankfully it's was a issue that we fixed and knew about at the time, so he was keeping an eye on it and caught it before it got close, but my heart still skipped a beat seeing that, this winter we tore that sprayer up and fixed the wiring so it runs better know

here in the UK vertical fold booms were not allowed to be sold years ago, good call.

When I was 9 or so I hit a power pole with my last disc on the plow 😂 Bent the hitch

Marker flags on the outside of the drills too expensive? Knowing exactly where your drill is versus guessing would seem to be worth the cost... 😎

excellent description and visuals on the wagon steering. quick question, does the non-articulated fendt 1050 cause the planter steering to react quicker?

Can you show us more videos of how you prep gear, rig tractor, wash it fuel it, loob it ...

As a firefighter and farm hand what I've learned about dismounting electrified equipment is that you should avoid touching anything metal when opening the door, put both your feet together (I've heard some people recommend crossing them at your ankles but to me that's just asking to make yourself fall when you hit the ground negating all the work to get off the unit), and hop off as far as possible. From there you want to shuffle your feet while keeping them touching until you are at least 20 feet away from the unit. Then you can slowly start sliding your feet apart. If you feel any tingling in any part of your body you slide your feet back together and then shuffle further away and try again until you no longer get a tingling. Don't ever lift your feet, don't ever touch the unit and the ground at the same time, and try to keep your limbs tucked and not flailing every which way as you that's asking for an electrical arc.

Good advice! I can not remember if you shuffle or hop. I blame old age for not remembering. I will say I have a very healthy respect for Power Lines. When I did volunteer fire fighting the power company put on a demonstration of lines. Put a hot dog in a glove. Poked a hole in the glove with a sewing needle. It arced from about 2 feet from a high voltage line.

Stay safe out there guys, those poles will sneak up on you!

Lol, Mike making plans in a case of an electrical emergency.... Knowing Mike, he goes and he pulls the wires off the drill 🤣

Would be quicker with a smaller seed drill, like I use in UK. Keep up with the videos. Great work and great team. Damian from UK 🇬🇧

Middle of know where and there you go... a power poll 😄

most importand only toch the ground in one spot if you jump keep your hands next to your feed hand take steps smaller than your feeds length

Hey Mike farmers also like to farm the ditches!

I used to run a CaseIH 3310 self propelled sprayer. The outer booms folded vertically so you had to be way out of the way of highline wires. Forgot it once and clipped a wire making a lot of sparks but no damage to the machine. I believe it hit the far outer plastic tip. But nonetheless scared the crap out of me.

im an electrician and work with 30.000 Volt lines, and we are told to jump on ONE leg! this way you do not have 2 contact points to the ground and have no chance to have current flow through your body.

Vertical flip/fold booms are as far as I know banned in the UK. Health and safety is finally coming into farming here but it’s not like construction industry where it is tighter. Farming is a dangerous life - keep safe all.

Pssst Mike! Maybe you didn't know this, but power and powerpoles boosts crop yields by 500%! So you do want to plow it down and get in the ground to get that yield up :D

If you jump out the tractor have both feet together and hop away with both feet together. After 20 jumps or something you should be safe. If you don't feel safe so more jumps. With every jump you have half the energy from the power line in your body.

Mike, don’t forget your lunch bucket

I was nervous just watching you go around the polls

Had a JD4630 hit a power pole, holes in outer duals. Works fine to this day though.

Mike Mitchell: "Dumb decisions are most likely going to cost you your life" One could apply that thought to the activities in a previous video.

When I worked out in sask one of the nieghbouring farms hit a power line opening up a sprayer. The guy jump as far as he could. He was lucky and survived but did do some pretty good damage to the sprayer. I do believe they fixed it tho.

I dont know how true it is but I was told once that their is more power poles then people in Saskatchewan!!

Yes if enough volts go there the tractor it will do damage to the mechanical parts of the machine too.if it is high enough in theory it can melt the internal parts of the machine

Idk if Mike already answered this question but how do the crops get irrigated? Are the crops dependent on rain or is there enough moisture in the ground that seed can germinate easily? I’m from an area where we are really dependent on sprinkler irrigation and then flood.

so what you need to consider is the auto reclose. most transmission lines have a system that reconnects the power. this is to deal with lightning strikes. people get fried because they hit the pole drop the line it then shorts out and goes off. you jump out. and the auto reclose comes in and 💥. the reclose can go up to three times before the breaker shuts off and then calls a fault. Dont get out and if someone is in the wire dont try to rescue

tractors grounded you could just stay in the cab. frying only happens when you are the connection between power and ground. so it's probably best to stay in the cab until you can confirm that the line is dead.

In Sweden we have some “rules” with high voltage that it can arc 1cm for every 1000 volts (it’s probably less but to be on the safe side).And it’s better to leap away from downed power lines with your feet as close together as possible.

What are the changes that Sask Energy could plow in cable and have the power line buried? Maybe you could do it for them if they supply the cable, in your free time.😁

Hello Mike. How many acres are you farming. And glad to see you on the John Deere 👌👌

Hola hermano!!!!! Saludo desde argentina!!!! A Dios!!!!

I think you have driven that rig before!