With Christmas just a few weeks away here are some last-minute gift ideas for the farmer in your life.

You can never have enough step-in posts when it comes to moving animals; especially if you are moving multiple times a day. This give you the ability to set up several moves at one time; saving you in the long run.

Good fence posts should be flexible — some can be bent nearly in half. This gives you piece of mind when handling posts in cold weather.

Rural King sells posts for about $2 a piece making it a bargain to stock up. You’ll also need extra polywire and reels, and good reels can be had from Kencove for around $12 and can handle around 800 feet of wire.

These mini-reels have hooks as part of the handle allowing them to be locked then hung on the fence speeding up the fence-making process. To make the cross fence hot, pick up several packs of alligator clip leads from Kencove for about $5 a piece.

Having good polywire is key and you don’t necessarily want to skip on this component. Having good flexible wire with good conductivity is key to keeping animals contained to the right paddock.

Batt latches are the perfect gift for those graziers who would like to move animals several times a day but due to work schedules are not on the farm to move animals.

These solar-powered gate releases can be programmed to release up to four times per day, run on minimal power and work well in low sunlight conditions. These are a product of New Zealand and only available in the U.S. through MSFfarm.com for $395. While that seems expensive for a gate release, the benefits of multiple moves per day this device provides to the off-farm grazier will quickly pay for itself.

Finally, a free smart phone app from the University of Missouri is available for both Apple and Android products. Thermal Aid, all one word using the search function, is a heat stress app for livestock. This is especially critical when animals are outside without shade during critical times over the summer.

Sometimes heat stress doesn’t appear in animals until it’s too late but this app combines the temperature and humidity for your location and gives you the ability to count and track breathing rates for individual animals recording the last five entries and will give you warnings when breathing rates begin to enter dangerous levels.

If you’re looking for cropland gifts a digital soil thermometer can be had for about $10 on Amazon.

Digital thermometers are excellent tools for determining planting windows and can illustrate the importance of having cover crops planted over late summer where soil temperatures can vary as much as 20 degrees between cover cropped fields and those with only crop residue.

Cool season plants produce root and top growth when soil temperatures are 40 degrees and above when measured at 4 inches deep and continue root growth from 40 degrees to freezing. Having a soil thermometer is a handy tool to see how long cool season covers will actively grow into the winter months.

A good tile spade at $35 is another tool that should be in every farmer’s arsenal who’s serious about soil health. A tile spade, while thinner and longer than a traditional shovel, allows you to quickly dig a hole and slice off a section of soil to observe the profile for improved organic matter and root growth.

Here’s hoping you and your family have a blessed holiday season and a prosperous new year.

Andy Gaver is a conservationist with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service in Butler County.