Mike Brennan's grandfather homesteaded the land that became Thunder Basin Ranch in 1947. Seventy-nine years later, Mike and his wife Sarah run 1,200 head of Angus-Hereford cross on 14,000 acres east of Gillette. The operation is lean — two full-time hands, three seasonal workers, and whatever hours Mike and Sarah can pull between calving, haying, and the thousand other jobs that keep a Wyoming ranch alive.
For years, feed lot cleanup was the job everyone dreaded. Three days a week, every week, from October through April — shoveling, scraping, and hauling accumulated manure and spoiled feed out of the lots by hand and with a 1980s-era tractor with a bent loader bucket. "That old Ford 5000 was a good tractor in its day," Mike says. "But its day was 1985. We were spending more time fixing it than running it, and the bucket couldn't carry enough to make a dent."
The breaking point came in January 2025. A stretch of minus-twenty nights froze the feed lots into concrete. The tractor couldn't scratch it. Mike's two hands spent an entire week with picks and a rented jackhammer trying to break through. "We lost a week of cattle management. Sarah was pulling calves alone while I was out there swinging a pick like it was 1890."
Mike's Wyoming Machinery sales rep, Dale Novak, had been suggesting a compact track loader for two years. Mike kept saying no. "I grew up on horses and tractors. A skid steer felt like admitting I couldn't handle it the old way." But after that January, Sarah made the call. "I told Dale we needed to try one. Mike wasn't going to call — his pride wouldn't let him."
Dale set up a Wyoming Rents rental on a Cat 259D3 CTL with a high-flow mulching head and a standard bucket. The machine showed up on a flatbed on a Tuesday. By Thursday, Mike had cleaned three feed lots that would have taken the crew a week. "The tracks walk right over the frozen stuff. The bucket breaks through it like nothing. I did in two days what took us a week with the tractor."
"I told myself I'd never need a skid steer. Now I can't imagine running this ranch without one."
— Mike & Sarah Brennan, Thunder Basin Ranch
Three months into the rental, Mike called Dale about the RPO — Rent-Purchase Option. "I'd been paying rent anyway. Dale showed me how the rental payments would apply toward purchase. It was a no-brainer." The 259D3 is now a permanent part of the Thunder Basin fleet.
Six months later, Mike added a Cat 303.5 mini excavator. "We had three miles of fence line that needed new posts, and a water line from the well to the north pasture that had been leaking for two years. I'd been putting it off because digging in this clay by hand is miserable." The 303.5 trenched the water line in a day and set fence posts at a rate that would have taken the crew three weeks by hand.
The numbers tell the story. Feed lot cleanup: three days down to one. Seasonal labor: cut by 40% because the machines do the work of three hands. And the working season extended by six weeks — the CTL handles frozen ground that would have shut down manual operations. "We're not a big operation," Sarah says. "Every dollar and every hour matters. Those machines gave us our time back."
Mike still rides the ranch on horseback most mornings. But when it's time to work, the Cat iron is running. "I told myself I'd never need a skid steer," he says, shaking his head. "Now I can't imagine running this ranch without one."