Pitch Fork 59"

Details

A pitch fork is for light bulky material: straw, hay, bedding, cleaning out a calving pen or a horse stall. It is not a manure fork for wet packed muck and it is not a digging fork for ground. Matching the fork to the material is most of why some forks last decades and others bend in a season. Fifty-nine inches is a full-length handle, and that is the number worth paying attention to. Short-handled forks are cheaper and they wreck your back, because every lift becomes a bend. With this length you can stand up, get the handle across your thigh and let leverage do the lifting. If you are cleaning pens for an hour at a stretch, the handle length matters more than anything else about the tool. Long also means more reach, which is useful throwing bedding into a pen over a rail or working into the back corner of a stall without climbing in. Look after the handle and the fork looks after itself. Keep it out of the weather, because a handle that goes through wet and dry cycles all winter is a handle that breaks mid-lift. Hang it up rather than standing it in a corner where the tines take the weight. Do not use it to pry, do not use it on frozen packed manure, and keep the tines out of the dirt where they blunt and bend.