John Marrinan is a man who lives off the fat of the land up in Camas Prairie, Montana. As a fourth-generation rancher in command of over 30,000 acres of Rocky Mountain territory, he is responsible for 500-600 head of cattle on a daily basis, and is hardly ever at rest when to comes to managing it all.

The trailer gets loaded for another trip to Marriman ranch.

Meanwhile, Ford has put its best foot forward to prove the street cred of the all-new 2015 F-150, and to that end has done everything from sunlight simulation on the paint and interior to these “You Test” videos, which put the new half-ton through its paces in various environments. In the previous episode, Brian Schober of Yuma, Arizona, ran the truck for 36 hours continuously, from temperatures ranging from the low 40s to near 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and the truck passed with flying colors.

However, up in Big Sky Country, Marrinan Ranch is a different ball game. Here, one of the most important tasks of the day-to-day operations involves feeding the cattle. This requires moving multiple enormous, 1800-pound bales of hay up and down 6-degree gradients over 40 miles of paved and unpaved roads; obviously, this is a job that tends to go more toward high-torque diesels like the F-250 and F-350.

Twenty miles there, twenty miles back: the 2015 F-150 hauled it all while getting great fuel economy.

Keith Weston, a Vehicle Dynamics supervisor for the 2015 F-150, is confident that the 3.5L EcoBoost-powered pickup can pass muster. “Every pound that we took out of this truck gets passed on to you in terms of load-carrying ability,” he says.

Marriman gets to it immediately, loading up six to eight bales onto his trailer at a time. Making the journey hundreds of times over several days, he eventually stocked up a whopping 400 bales (600,000 pounds) of hay for the winter. “We worked it, we weren’t babying it,” said Marriman. “Bouncing across the fields, pulling hay, you unhook one trailer, you hook up another trailer, you’re hooking up a piece of equipment and moving it to the next field [all the time].”

Score one more for Ford’s next generation half-ton and its drivetrain. It appears that power and fuel economy go hand-in-hand with the EcoBoost-equipped 2015 F-150, and will do so for a long time to come.