King of the Hill | Lifetime Ford Loyalist | Prescott Brothers Ford Rochelle IL

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.

 By Sam Martin

Photography by Bridget Barrett

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.

Canyon Lands

My Ford tests the off-road limits of the 2014 Explorer with a journey to southwest Utah’s legendary national parks.

By Seth Putnam
Photography by Jonathan Kane
You can feel the gallop through the steering wheel of the 2014 Ford Explorer Sport as we surge through steep mountain ranges, effortlessly passing other road warriors on the way from Salt Lake City to Moab, Utah.
On the surface, the Explorer is a sleek and stylish vehicle, roomy enough to comfortably accommodate seven people and a cargo area full of gear. But looks can be deceiving, and beneath the hood of this black beauty is a beast of a machine: a 3.5-liter twin-turbo EcoBoost^® engine that boasts plenty of hauling and climbing ability, all with impressive EPA-estimated fuel economy ratings.*

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Utah has an idiosyncratic climate that threatens to shift every few minutes. During a three-and-a-half-hour afternoon drive, fog turns to rain to snow to rain and back to fog. Whipping the windshield, the otherworldly snowflakes seem—deceptively—as if they’re as big as the palm of my hand. Despite the wild weather, the Explorer is doing great on the highway. But how will it perform when the pavement ends?

The Descent

When we arrive in Moab, we head straight to Canyonlands National Park to find out. We enter the preserve at dawn, just as the sun begins glinting off the red rock canyon walls. Pulling off the road, we get out of the car and walk gingerly toward the canyon’s edge. The earth seems to disappear, with hundreds of feet of sheer cliff dropping away from our toes. The centuries peel away, and I begin to think how difficult it must have been for Native Americans and settlers alike to move across this unforgiving landscape, much less make a home here. We’ve arrived in a vehicle packed with technology, from the available SYNC^® with MyFord Touch^® voice-activated technology**—which allows me to use voice commands to get directions, make phone calls, and even skim through the available SiriusXM^® Radio^† stations—to the available heated leather-trimmed seats that take the bite out of the desert’s freezing dawn.
When you stand face-to-face with nothing but thin air, your hands start to tremble. Your knees shake, and it feels like your stomach has taken up residence in your mouth. One wrong move could end in a free fall. It’s a sobering reminder that for all of humanity’s efforts to tame it, the ferocious wilderness still lurks. The Explorer had taken us to the brink, and it was time to push the envelope.
In the distance, what looks like a game trail snakes its way down to the canyon floor. We decide to explore the trailhead, and we discover that it’s actually the Shafer Trail, a road into the backcountry. On second thought, “road” might be a charitable description; it’s little more than a one-lane path carved into the side of the canyon. On the right, a sheer red rock wall towers into the sky. On the left, nothing but thin air. How can we say no?
The Explorer’s available Terrain Management System^TM is designed to intelligently deliver the vehicle’s resources in the way that best fits the landscape. The Sand setting keeps the transmission in its lowest gears and allocates the vehicle’s 350 foot-pounds of torque to the wheels to aggressively pilot through desert conditions. With Hill Descent Control^TM enabled, we set our desired speed and begin our off-road descent, handling the plummeting switchbacks with ease.
The walls of Lathrop Canyon shoot up around us as we plunge into the abyss we had been standing above only moments ago. Looking along the contours of the gorge, the snowcapped La Sal Mountains form a stark contrast to the searing desert clime surrounding the SUV. Just when we think we’ve reached the floor, huge fissures open up in front of us: canyons within the canyon. The Explorer scrambles over the rough rocks with all the grace and poise of a mountain lion. After several miles of winding, rugged road along the Colorado River, we emerge from the canyon onto pavement, victorious over a trail that—despite its beauty—was fraught with danger.

The Climb

In awe of the earth’s oddities, we head to Arches National Park to ascend into an entirely different landscape. There, we discover spires of sandstone that tower over us like castle ruins. Below our feet lies an ancient salt bed that’s thousands of feet thick in places. The bed was created 300 million years ago, when the sea flowed into the Paradox Basin. The basin evaporated over time, forming the bed, which continued to rise and sink as the environment changed. A plethora of rock layers formed, and as erosion and acid rain began to take effect, weaker bottom layers fell away from stronger top layers, creating the striking arches that more than a million visitors flock to see each year.
The current rangers of the park are also concerned with fostering natural ecosystems. They do this by eliminating exotic plants while encouraging native ones to grow. Some plants in the park are over 100 years old and are examples of the resilience needed to survive in the desert.
Despite this hardiness, conserving the delicate desert ecosystem is an important task, the scope and scale of which is not to be underestimated. The rangers are following in the footsteps of forward-thinkers like Teddy Roosevelt (revered as one of the fathers of the national parks system) and Edward Abbey, an extreme naturalist and author who served as an Arches park ranger in the 1960s.
It’s essential work that allows us to revel in the wonders of the natural world. But it’s also a reminder that adventures in the wilderness can be tough, especially in a place like the rugged desert of Moab. Luckily, the Explorer is just as rugged and has shown that it’s up for the challenge.
FAST FACTS

2014 EXPLORER

>SOLID FOOTING The 4WD system allows the Explorer to deliver confidence and traction in all conditions.
>SAFE ON SLOPES Hill Descent Control^TM lets you set and maintain a constant speed while traveling downhill.
>ADAPTABLE TO ALL TERRAIN The Terrain Management System^TM lets you easily shift on the fly into one of four settings to match the terrain: Normal, Mud/Ruts, Sand and Snow, Gravel, Grass.

*EPA-estimated rating of 16 city/22 hwy/18 combined mpg, 3.5-liter EcoBoost^® 4WD. Actual mileage will vary. **Driving while distracted can result in loss of vehicle control. Only use mobile phones and other devices, even with voice commands, when it is safe to do so. Not all features are compatible with all phones.
^†Subscriptions to all SiriusXM services are sold by SiriusXM after trial expires. Subscriptions are governed by SiriusXM Customer Agreement; see www.siriusxm.com. Sirius U.S. Satellite Service available in the 48 contiguous United States and D.C. Sirius, XM and all related marks and logos are trademarks of Sirius XM Radio Inc.