Lawn, Garden & Landscaping
2009-04-01 14:39:00
Keeping the lawn mower mowing - series
Question: You’ve talked about lawn and garden tractors, but I need something that will do more, maybe a small utility tractor. Can you please advise?
Answer: With the exception of tractor-pulls and wagon-hauling, tractors are not much use by themselves. If you want to mow, you need a mower. To clip pastures and meadows, you need a brush hog (rotary cutter) mower. To haul manure and stones, you need a loader. To pull fence posts, lift logs, or hold a hog over a scalding drum, you need a lift or crane. Can you see where I’m going with this, the list is endless: spreaders, blades, plows, discs, cultivators, rotary tillers, posthole diggers, sprayers, etc. If you have specialized needs, there are tractor-driven or tractor-pulled accessories to solve the problem.
Fortunately, you don’t always need the perfect implement to get a job done. A brush hog is ideal for clipping pastures; it also does a decent job of mulching orchard clippings. A post hole auger is designed to dig holes; it can also be adapted as a boom crane. A loader is perfect for handling manure; it can also plow the snow off your driveway, re-grade the gravel, and haul brush, stones, or firewood. If you had a lot of driveways to plow, you might want a blade instead; if you had lots of gravel or dirt to grade you might want a box scraper; but the loader will do it. The trick is to select versatile implements, with the emphasis on the jobs that are most important on your place. Once you know which implements you will need, you can pick a tractor to pull them.
Whether you go for one versatile tractor, or a collection of specialized tractors, the machine has to be sized for the job. Here it is important to distinguish between different kinds of work. Ground-engaging work, pulling implements that dig or cut into the earth, like a plow or a disc, makes the biggest demands on a tractor. To pull a plow you need horsepower, ground clearance, and traction. Some garden tractors include ground-engaging tools, like miniature moldboard plows, among their available implements, but a plow pulled by a garden tractor, no matter what the horsepower, does more scratching than turning of the earth.
Implements all have to be hitched onto the tractor, which for most tractors larger than a lawn tractor means a three-point hitch. The standardized three-point hitches, in sizes from category “0” for garden tractors to category “3” for agricultural behemoths, evolved to remedy the mutual incompatibility of implements and tractors from different manufacturers. Implements which fit a three-point hitch are fastened by lynch pins to three arms, two hydraulically (or in some very small tractors, mechanically) controlled lower arms, and a free-pivoting upper arm, or top link. One of the lower arms can be adjusted to level the implements from side to side, and the length of the top link can be adjusted to level the implements from front to rear. Depending upon the vertical distance between the attachment points of the lower arms and the top link, the implement will either be lifted almost vertically by the rockshaft control, or will be tilted back, toward the tractor, as it is lifted. It takes about five minutes to hook an implement to a tractor with a three-point hitch.
Choosing a tractor is like choosing a computer. With a computer, you decide what you want it for, select the software you will need, then choose a machine that will run that software. With a tractor, it makes sense to start with a list of what jobs have to get done, how often they need to be done, and how much tractor time they will take. Some jobs may be important enough to demand a dedicated implement. Others may be so occasional that you can rent equipment to do the job, or adapt implements that are less than ideal. Once you have a list of the implements that you need, figure out how big a tractor you need to use those implements on your place.
The trick in compiling a list is to put down the jobs that need to get done on your place, rather than the jobs that you fantasize by the fireside on winter nights. If you are sure that in a year or two you are going to plant six acres of corn on what is now a second-growth meadow, you may want a tractor big enough to pull a two-bottom plow. But if you buy a tractor too big or too unwieldy to pull a mower over the acre of lawn that has to be mowed every week, you may find that the tractor doesn’t get much use, and that you need a riding mower in addition to the behemoth.
It is just as much a mistake to expect too much of a small tractor. You can buy plows and disc harrows and front loaders and even backhoes for garden tractors, but a garden tractor is primarily a lawn mowing machine. It will do a dandy job of mowing, pulling small carts, and plowing the snow off a driveway; once the land has been broken by a larger machine, a garden tractor with a rotary tiller will do a fine job of cultivating a large garden plot. But it cannot substitute for a general purpose or utility tractor for hauling, clipping overgrown brush, or heavy tillage.
A final consideration may influence your choice of a tractor. One of the pleasures of country living is the easy swap of tools and “custom” work. If one of your neighbors has a posthole auger that would be just right for fencing your meadow, that’s not a bad reason to buy a tractor with a hitch and PTO that will fit the auger, especially if you also buy that lime spreader that is just what both of you need to renovate your pastures.
