#80 How To Choose YOUR Perfect Tractor!

so welcome back everybody Mike here you may have noticed I did not clap my hands and rub my hands together that's just out of habit I do that at the beginning of each video kind of like you're getting ready to tear into something you know but I had a comment on one of my videos and they were very polite about it and they said it creeps them out when I rub my hands together and I thought well that's strange you know I don't know so I mentioned it to my wife you know and she said yeah that is creepy what the heck's I don't know should I just stand with my hands in my pockets maybe whatever but anyway today's video is how to choose your perfect tractor and I want to emphasize on your tractor because what's perfect for me may not be the perfect tractor for you in the United States people keep their cars on average around six or seven years last time I saw that and but people buy tractors and keep them for decades so the intent of this video is to help a first-time tractor buyer get the perfect tractor for them so they don't suffer any buyer's remorse and also it may be helpful for anyone looking to upgrade and this video is for you know landowner it's not really like farmers those guys they know exactly what they need I've been doing it forever you know this is for the people with maybe a rural property or you know really any size lot of a half acre up to hundreds of acres you no matter what you're into you know whether it be food plots or you just gotta mow fields or firewood in or or whatever but this video is for basically the landowner so I had this idea for this video a few weeks ago because I belong to several different tractor forums and you know tractor related Facebook pages and it's almost daily it is daily you see somebody posts you know I've got 20 acres which tractor should I buy and everybody's more than willing to help but it gets overwhelming there'll be 50 responses get a cab do this do that well there's a lot of different things to consider you know when you're buying a tractor and just throwing it out there like that without a whole lot of detail you get all kinds of answers and I think people end up more confused than when they started so I thought it would be pretty cool to ask viewers of this channel to email me pictures of their tractors and I could incorporate them into this video so people can get a look at them and you know kind of see the area that they live and those kind of and see what people use I was expecting to get like 20 or 30 pictures and I got at least 350 or 400 of them so I'm gonna include them right now in this video and I apologize if I missed anybody there's a few that the pictures didn't come through but I think I got them all and each tractor is only getting about a half a second of airtime because if I did it longer than that the video would be a couple of hours long but it was really neat reading the emails and seeing all these pictures and I really appreciate it it's pretty cool I didn't realize there are so many people out there like me but anyway check out all the viewers tractors right now [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] now in this video we're not really gonna discuss what brand of tractor that's for a different subject for a different day however I will be referencing you know Kubota tractors just because that's what I'm most familiar with now the first things you want to think about you know you've got this idea you own some property like me and I need to get a tractor I want to use this property more I want to take care of it a couple things to consider like I said before you want to how much land do you have you know it's important what's the terrain like you know you live in a flat area real steep areas wet and marshy you know it's something else to consider next would be the climate where do you live you get lots of snow is it really hot those kind of things but I think even more important than those things are is what you intend to use the tractor for because in other words you could have a hundred acres of property all wooded and you really don't even cut firewood but all you have to do is maintain a driveway and work around the house well that's gonna be a lot different tractor than somebody that owns a hundred acres with fifty or sixty acres of it you know being fields that need mowed two totally different things so I wouldn't totally focus on just how much ground you have focus on what you think the primary purpose of that tractor will be what it will be used for the most and start there now let's first get an idea of what size tractor you need you know how big and how many horsepower of a tractor that you need for your property the interesting thing about tractors are you know pretty much you can do the same work with a small tractor is you can a big tractor with the exception obviously a like loader capacity and things like that but I mean like I said I'm gonna reference Kubota is here like a little bx 25 you know you can pull a box blade behind it a little brush hog a finish mower you know belly mower underneath a bit as a front loader on it and it'll do all the things it's like a Big M series tractor obviously won't have the lifting capacity so keep that in mind you know that's another thing to consider how much time do you have and what can you afford you know if you have tons of mowing it's gonna take you a long time with that little tractor where you could buy a bigger one it's gonna be less time now I'm gonna go out on a limb here but for most landowners you know say three or four or five acres or more really any tractor from like 25 horsepower to the 40 horsepower range is probably gonna take care of most of your needs unless you have you know like I said 50 acres of property and you have to mow 30 of that you're gonna want a bigger tractor but also keep in mind you know the bigger the tractor you buy the more bang for the buck you're gonna get so to speak so for example like I said I'm gonna reference Kubota tractors I wrote some things down here take like a BX 2680 you know a small tractor for working around the house and you know people use my bigger properties to like I say it's just gonna take a little bit longer but if you bought one with a loader and a backhoe you're looking at roughly $20,000 maybe a little bit less but say 20 grand well the loader capacity of that back of that tractor is about six hundred and fifteen pounds give or take all right so keep that in mind six hundred and fifteen pounds $20,000 tractor like mine Kubota elf 3901 get a loader backhoe you know hydrostatic you're probably looking at close to thirty thousand dollars the loader capacity on that is about eleven hundred and thirty one pounds almost double the lift capacity for 50% more money now step it up one more notch to like a Kubota you know MX 5800 you know that's about a 60 horsepower tractor you get a loader backhoe on it you know the lift capacity of that loader is 20 275 pounds about double of what mine does for another 10 grand more so the bigger the tractor you get you're kind of getting more power for the dollar I broke it down actually by pound you know of loader capacity the BX 2680 you're paying about $32 and 62 cents for every pound of loader capacity the l-39 owe 126 dot 52 cents the MX 5800 you're looking at 17 dollars and 58 cents so keep that in mind bigger tractor more bang for the buck next I want to talk about two-wheel drive or four-wheel drive tractors see a lot of people say I don't really need to old Drive this is an easy one and this will go quick I have never in my life heard anybody with a four-wheel drive tractor say you know what man I wish I would have got a two-wheel drive instead of this Thorne four-wheel drive it's not gonna happen get a four-wheel drive tractor I'm sure there's a few instances where you don't need it and you know like I say you get into a big tractor you don't really need it these things they just don't have the weight and the four-wheel drive is just great for you know everything loader work pulling a set of disks anything it's a great balance to the tractor and you'll get much more traction and you'll be much more happier and you will not ever suffer buyer's remorse buying four-wheel drive that's easy now transmissions there's basically three types of transmissions for the size track do you have your regular gear drive which have been around forever and they're bulletproof a gear drive transmission would be great you know say you're just mowing big fields you're just going one direction most of the time or you're running sets of discs or tiller or whatever nothing wrong with a gear drive transmission at all where they lack is when you get into loader work when you have a front loader on your tractor that's a lot of shifting a lot of messing around going forward or backward the next type of transmission is your hydrosphere is your shuttle shift transmission still kind of have gears but you can just kind of shift back and forth with the lever forward and back you know you're still switching gears they're a lot better for loader work and it's kind of a good middle of the road type transmission for an all-around tractor now for me I got the hydrostatic transmission it's just - it's just one pedal push down it goes forward push back it goes backward and then there's three different ranges low medium and high that is the fastest on the you know fastest transmission for doing loader work and I like it for brush hogging when you're backing in and out of trees it's very fast but like I said it if you're just concentrating on mowing big fields or or things like that maybe a gear drive or shuttle shift is right for you and but those are the three types of transmissions just remember hydrostatic or going back and forth real easy real quick gear drive or just going long distances forward on these compact tractors there's usually pretty much three types of tires you give your turf tire which is pretty self-explanatory turf tires are for mowing they don't have a whole lot of tread on them and that prevents you from scalping your lawn those kind of things a turf tire is great so if you if you're buying a tractor and you think at least 75% of the time you're going to be mowing with it you're probably gonna want to get a turf tire and that other 25% of the tire it's not gonna perform quite as well as the other tires but for your primary purpose turf tire might be for you now I have an industrial tire also known as our fours worksite tires they're a little bit wider than an AG tire a lot wider than an agate are you still get some traction they're kind of designed for hard surfaces and they work decent in the snow and in the mud but they're just a good all-around tire it's more like a construction turn and looking through all the pictures it looked like about 80% had Turner had industrial tires on their tractors the last and most aggressive type tire is the actor these tires are fur or for pulling that tractor through soft dirt through mud through snow they're great traction tires a little softer compound and in these industrial tires now for me for example if it's real muddy out and stuff I'm not cutting firewood I'm not trying to brush hog anything this isn't my job I do this because I like to do it so if it's you know if I'm gonna be tearing up my trails to go get a load of firewood I'm not gonna do it you know if I had to I would I would have gotten the AG tire but I don't have to do that that's why I chose tires that I have on my tractor next should you get a loader for your tractor you know some people may think they don't need it same thing that I mentioned about the four-wheel drive or not I have never heard anybody say you know what I wish I wouldn't got this loader I've never found anything I can do with it never happens if you can afford it definitely get a loader for your tractor backhoe that's a little bit different in my opinion if you have a little bit of digging to do or even a lot of digging but smaller jobs quite frequently you'd probably want to get a backhoe for your tractor now for me I kind of saved that work up and you know digging stumps things like that and I'll rent a mini excavator but that's gonna depend on the area that you live in you know what kind of availability you have on you know rental machine and what the cost is but you know I think if I go for my tractors probably $7,000 6500 something like that I ran a mini excavator probably twice a year for 350 bucks for the weekend comparative backhoe on my tractor so I can rent one for a lot of years and get stuff done a lot faster than I could if I had a backhoe on this tractor like I said that's gonna be very specific to your area your needs cab for your tractor I did not get a cab machine my tractor has about 180 hours on it and out of those 180 hours there's probably ten hours that I wish I had a cab once when I was pushing a bunch of snow and another time when it's about 90 some degrees and I was brush Augen for a neighbor those are really the only two times for me I'm on and off my tractor all the time for firewood and I might grate a little section of road change attachments and go cut firewood or or just I'm constantly on and off the tractor and I didn't really need a cab and I don't really want a cab and I'm in the woods a lot and you know you're constantly moving branches out of your way things like that I just the cab machine is not for me but if you live you know Buffalo New York and you're pushing snow from you know Halloween till May you probably gonna want a cab if you're in the deep south and you've got a bunch of brush Augen or mowing to do for hours on end probably gonna want a cab so once again that's site-specific and what your needs call for now here's what I think the most important thing and it's kind of an unknown but you need to consider when you're buying a tractor plan ahead and plan for the unknown you know I did not get the third function valve on this tractor when I bought it and I should have because I want to get a wicked grapple off everything attachments that I'm going to but I should have just got that third function valve when I bought the tractor you know you might want to look into rear remotes but plan ahead and you know try to get a base tractor it's just easy to add to it without much expense later on I suggest buying the biggest tractor you can get you know for your needs and then just buy the attachments as needed over the next five 10 15 years but get that base unit something else you want to do once you have a tractor you will find uses for it that you never knew existed and you will expand places of your property that's what I've done and you may find that you kind of wish you would have got something a bit bigger because you get these tractors are a real time-saver you know you knock out all these projects and you're like you know I don't some trails I'm going to do this that's what I've done I mean five six years ago I didn't have hardly any trails around here now I got almost two miles of trails I've got I cleared some more land I've got more to mow so plan ahead you know and once you take all this information that we're talking about here today you know ask questions in the comments and all these guys that sent pictures in and people that haven't you know will start a good conversation and it should be beneficial and I'd also ask that you share this video whenever you see somebody post a question you know which tractor should I buy share this video with them it'll at least get them started and get them thinking because there's nothing worse than spending twenty thirty thousand dollars on something and you know six months lady you know shoulda coulda woulda you don't want to do that so try to get it right the first time one more thing I may add is once you take this information and and you think about it and talk to other people or other people it's tractors and you go to that dealer and you're feeling pretty confident most of them are very helpful and but just beware there's a few out there that will have the perfect tractor for you coincidentally it's the one that's been sitting on our lot for six months that they have many of the sell so keep that in mind you know find a dealer that you feel comfortable with and a good salesman take this information that we're talking about today kind of get a general idea you know narrow it down as much as you can before you even go in there and talk to them and I think things will go a lot easier for you and you will find yourself the perfect tractor for you and but I think that's really yet once again I want to thank everyone that's sent the pictures in and that was pretty cool I'm gonna start trying to reply to some of the emails there's a pile of them and I but it's really neat but I hope this video is helpful and if you feel that it is share it with your friends share it on forums or your Facebook pages and I would appreciate it and but that's it thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next one [Music]

Channel: Outdoors With The Morgans

Views: 153,225

Keywords: Tractor, Compact tractor, 4 wheel drive, Front Loader, John Deere, Kubota, Backhoe, Rural Living, Brush Hog, Rotary Cutter, Finish Mower, 3 point, rototiller, Box Scraper, York Rake, Buying a Tractor

Id: Cy9s5Sr1eYY

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 07 2017