Do you have a tractor?

[Leersia]

If so, please tell me about it. Old, new? New, used? Attachments you can't live without?

If it is 20-25 HP, can you do what you need to with it or do you curse its underpoweredness?

Did you try to do a lot by hand without one for a while, and did it improve your life? More help than problems?

Thanks!

[Tizzy]

We have a tractor, and it has been worth every penny!
Despite having a wonderful neighbor who let us borrow his whenever we needed, we really did need our own. One for blowing snow, it's a necessity in our climate/location.
Two for cleaning out the barn, moving hay bales, doing firewood, we've been doing a ton of construction and it has just been so helpful.

It's a White 1270, around 40hp. Small enough to fit in our barn to clean out but large enough (and four wheel drive) to be useful for other things. It was $8000 which is more than we've paid for anything else, so that's intimidating. But it is a great little workhorse and I can see it lasting for another decade or more.

It has a loader (obviously) and came with a bucket (needs a new one soon). We have a snow blower (exchanged some work for a neighbor) and DH made forks for the loader.
We borrow a bush hog from one neighbor once a year or so, and a scraper blade from another neighbor once a year or so.
DH is very mechanically minded so he does all repairs/maintenance which is why we opted for an older model. But if you don't have that advantage, a newer one might be wiser.

[mamadelbosque]

Yup, we have a tractor. Its an old Yanmar and works just fine. I have no idea how many hp it is... my dad boughti t several yrs ago. It does what we need it to -haul firewood, occasionally hay, boats/dock down to the lake, etc. We got by w/o one for years, but had a beater truck... when dad got a new truck and trashed the old one, he bought the t
tractor.

[AJP]

We have a 40hp Kubota diesel 4WD. 2WD would be useless on our terrain and anything smaller wouldn't be very useful for us either, because our property is on a slope with rocky clay soil and we very often use the tractor for making flat spots (garden, animal shelters, etc.). We used to borrow a friend's 22HP, and it just didn't have the power needed to move our soil. Ours is old, late 70s I think, and had been sorely abused when we got it, virtually no maintenance, needed tires, fuel tank was corroding away and continually plugging the fuel lines and filter. We put a few thousand $ into it, and now it's great. It came with a bucket and box scraper, we've since acquired a PTO wood chipper, a fork lift and hubby built a man-lift box and tool pallet (for carrying around heavy tools for various jobs). We also use it to move hay, manure piles and other heavy things. So useful, and it makes so many things around here more feasible.

[1jooj]

Ours in an old Oliver...I don't know what, but it's pretty old, about 40hp. We had older, smaller tractors before (Ford 8N, 9N) but they didn't have the power to do much. Our has a bucket and we'll use it on snow in winter (ISO snow chains). We use it to move heavy things, dig, haul manure/compost/yard waste. It has enough power to use with small implements like sickle mower and baler.

For our yard, it really is great to plow with a tractor. We have snowblowers, but a big dump takes forever to deal with, and we end up blowing several times during the storm...which can mean 8 hours of nonstop snowblowing. It's nice to be able to plow out a path.

I still do a lot of hauling by hand with a wheelbarrow, in terms of yard waste and manure. All depends on what I am trying to get done.

[WindAndSolar]

We have a Massey Ferguson it is somewhere around 32 hp and we have had it for 3 years. It is 4 WD and we had the rear tires weighted with chloride. It has a rear snowblower, a bucket, a finish mower, a logging winch and a PTO shaft generator (which is a necessity in the winter, since we live off-grid). We use it so often that we couldn't live w/out it...we would have to pay someone a lot of $$ to plow our road, put the topsoil around our house when we finished building, hauling logs for firewood, scoop horse manure from our neighbor's farm for our compost pile, mow the lawn/field, we even "rent" a friend's tiller to till our garden/pumpkin patch/sunflower strip.

My husband complains that it is too small and today was the first day that I finally saw what he means. Last year we had to have major work done to the tractor b/c the frame basically fell apart, basically b/c we were using it for things that really needed a bigger tractor. Looking back I would say I wish we had gone w/ the next size up (in our case 40 hp) b/c we ended up paying for it in the long run...

Good luck, I love driving the tractor...I feel like such a hip chick!

[Linzie2]

Originally Posted by WindAndSolar

a PTO shaft generator (which is a necessity in the winter, since we live off-grid).

What is that?

[1jooj]

Electricity generator powered by the tractor's power takeoff shaft. It spins a motor to create electricity, and you plug stuff into it.

[*~Danielle~*]

We have an old Ford 2N or something like that with a three point hitch. It works fine for most of the stuff we need. We have a slip scoop, a plow, a snow blade for the driveway, a flail mower and some other stuff. It is on the smaller side and would not be able to lift a large round bail of hay without having some counter weight on front like a front loader. So depending on what you are wanting it for...

We traded an aluminum fishing boat and $1000 for it.

[GardenStream]

We have a John Deere 4310, which is a compact tractor. It's 32HP and we have the front end loader, a blade, a post hole digger, a belly mower, a brush hog and a 5' rototiller.

It's been a good tractor, but we aren't doing any farming with it. It's for mowing, plowing the driveway, digging holes and lifting things. It's really just DH's favorite toy.

We tried to dig holes by hand, but there are some areas of our yard which are just impossible for us. It made setting the clothesline posts so much easier. I also wouldn't have the size garden I do without the rototiller. We use the tractor to do a lot of lifting instead of asking friends to come over and help. I wanted a rain collection system, so we built a wooden tower to set 2 totes up that are 275 gallons each. We used the bucket and some chains to get the totes up there. It would have been really difficult without that.