Photography by Bridget Barrett
A LIFETIME FORD LOYALIST PUTS THE NEW 2015 SUPER DUTY TO THE ULTIMATE TEST: A DAY OF WORK ON HIS 1,500-ACRE FARM OUTSIDE OF CUNNINGHAM, KANSAS.
Farm work waits for no one. So when My Ford rolls up at a homestead in central Kansas with a 2015 King Ranch F-350, our test driver is hardly sitting around waiting for us. Bob Renner, 54, is prepping the hay baler on the back of his 2000 F-350, getting ready to feed 100 head of cattle and almost 90 baby calves.
Renner is a quintessential midwestern farmer. His manners are old school, his smile is broad—his stories are told with a sparkle in his eye. Like most people who have worked the land their whole life, he has seen his fair share of trials and tribulations. In 1984, while driving to a dance in his hometown of Cunningham, Renner was involved in a serious car accident. After being airlifted to a hospital in Wichita, he awoke from a coma seven days later without his left arm.
“The doctor told my father there were two ways people reacted to an injury like mine,” Renner says. “They either complain the rest of their life, or they yell at you to leave them alone. Well, we were leaving the hospital, and my dad opened the car door for me. I yelled at him, ‘Dad, I only lost one arm. I can do this myself!’ I was tough to be around for a few years there, but I was lucky enough to have a lot of people who loved me.”
Spend a day with Renner at his 1,500-acre farm and its neighboring townships of Cunningham, St. Leo and Zenda, and you’ll quickly see there are still plenty of people who love this man. You’ll also see that the loss of a limb has done nothing to slow this father of three. Renner, along with his wife, Donna, raises cattle and grows wheat and alfalfa on his land, a part of America that has been in his family for three generations.
His method of farm management relies on squeezing every last drop of production out of his fleet of five Ford pickup trucks. Listening to the genealogy of Renner’s trucks is like listening to his family history. “My dad always ran Ford trucks,” he explains. “So I always, always, drove Ford. I’ve sold some, I’ve wrecked a few, but they’re awfully tough pickups.”
“My red pickup [the 2000 F-350], that’s my overall work truck that I feed cattle and haul hay with all the time. I just about live in it. It has about 300,000 miles on it and is still going strong.”
The tough miles that Renner puts on his trucks make this the perfect setting for today’s test: putting one of the very first 2015 King Ranch F-350 trucks through its paces on a working farm. “When I woke up this morning, I was excited,” Renner says. “I’d never thought I’d have people from Detroit come to my place to let me drive a brand-new F-350. So I’m ready to put it to the test.”
WHAT A FARM NEEDS
A typical day for Renner begins with a trip to inspect and feed his herd of cattle and, at this time of year, baby calves. “I don’t brand my cattle, but on any given morning I may have to tag calves, check to see if anything’s wrong with them, and give them a feed.”
He keeps his bales of alfalfa on the second story of a tall white barn with red trim, built by his grandfather in 1919. Renner opens a small hatch 20 feet in the air and throws four green bales down into the tray of the waiting F-350. As he steers the truck down toward the nearby paddock filled with the waiting herd, he reflects on what he considers when purchasing a vehicle for his farm.
“When I buy a truck, I’m mainly thinking about weight. I do a lot of hauling: I haul a very heavy swather, cattle, a lot of hay—sometimes upwards of 16,000 pounds. You need good towing capability to do that.”
Luckily for Renner, the 2015 Super Duty has been designed to work. The second generation 6.7-liter Power Stroke® Turbo Diesel offers best-in-class power. This is a truck built to tow, to increase productivity for its owner, and to do so as efficiently as any truck on the market.
