I Brush Hogged 49 Acres with a Compact Tractor - Here's What I Learned

[Music] [Music] hi it's brock here with rock hill farms i'm out here today with my little two series john deere and a six foot bush hog to cut 49 acres and that's probably not an ideal pairing but the situation kind of dictates it the person needs this bush hog as soon as possible didn't get any responses from anyone with a larger piece of equipment i told him i can do it i just don't know how long it'll take i'm going to use this job to find out how many acres i can bush hog in an hour when it's just weeds and grass most of the jobs i've taken we're cutting thick stuff that i could barely even manage with the bush hog this has previously always been mowed it just got away from them a little bit so it'll be a good measuring stick and at the end of this video i'm gonna break down kind of the profitability of this type of bush hogging what i think is a good rate to charge how long does it take and hopefully that's helpful to you guys [Music] [Applause] [Music] um [Music] so i had a few mechanical breakdowns i had some unexpected problems and really quite a few things i'd like to share but let's start off by just listening to the brush hog work a little bit so [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] all right well i've only mowed a little bit and i'm already running into a couple problems that i should have factored in so we're gonna put the tractor in the barn here on their property they said it was fine if we leave it here and i'm gonna go i'm gonna get some goggles because the dust is absolutely blinding my eyes um i might bring back the rear glass for the tractor and possibly even the doors so i'm gonna see if i can make that dust a little bit more manageable so i'll be right back all right well i got out here and i got started on the brush hogging yesterday and the combination of the heat and the dust made it really difficult i only had a couple hours anyway yesterday but i had to knock it off early because i just could barely breathe or actually worse than breathing was the amount of dust in my eyes and obviously your hands are covered in it so you can't wipe your eyes and i was having trouble keeping my eyes open so what i'm gonna do today i've got out here a lot earlier it's seven right now i was hoping to get started at six but it's just after seven i'm gonna put the doors on the cab i'm gonna put the back glass on the cab and seal it up and run it with the fans as long as i can i've got a cooler with some ice water and some cold towels that i can put on my neck if i need to i'm going to run it with the doors on the cab for as long as i can try to keep the dust off me and once it starts to get hot i'll take those doors off and i'm going to put a respirator and some goggles on and see how much i can get done i've brush hogged my own fields that were grass seven acres out there and you know you you notice dust right it's just part of brush hogging but i've never experienced it like what it was yesterday i don't know if maybe it was the way the wind was blowing or the type of grass or maybe the grass was more dry i don't know but it was pretty rough on me so we gotta rethink the plan here and and give it another shot i think i might cut a little better if i drop my rear wheel so the back of the bush hog is just a little bit higher it's really hilly and at some points i'm almost bottoming it out and i just think it might run a little better that way seems like ben from k h tractors told me one time that i needed to drop my rear wheel so we'll give that a try i'm also going to let down on the ground and make sure that it's level side to side again on the hills and the dips and stuff it's hard to tell but i think i may be sloped a little bit this way there's three holes farther forward and then four further back so it looks like there's seven settings it was on the fourth mark and i just moved it down one bolt hole so we'll see if that does any better let me let the brush hog down and check it for level side to side [Music] [Music] man always had stories about the city life and the crazy nights i figure i should probably give it a try maybe check it out see what it's all about but the traffic was fast and the money was sold the people i met should never get to know this place i used to live back home [Music] where where everybody knows my name my friends are still the same i guess [Music] trying to save your time in case you're thinking about breaking out the bucket list girl you can skip this funny business cause up there it's complicated and overrated down [Music] all right i'm gonna show you just a hazard of this kind of work sometimes things happen and you deal with it and you go on somewhere out where i was working there was some kind of an old rake or you know like a four-prong garden hoe and i ran over it and i've got fluid leaking out of the tire starting to get a little bit low luckily there's a service center around here that's sending a technician out here to fix it in place so i should be back up and going pretty quick but i'm losing the best weather of the day to work in let's see what time it is it's nine o'clock so i had about an hour left before it starts to get hot so we'll get this fixed up if the technician is agreeable to that i'm gonna record him making the repair which might be helpful to some people i ended up making a complete separate video just on this tire repair it was pretty cool the way he fixed it on location and how quick he got done but i'll put a link to that towards the end of the video if you're interested in seeing it [Music] so [Music] [Applause] what you're seeing here is the end of day two of what ended up being a four day project really could have been done in two days except i had a couple problems like you've already seen and i tried to avoid mowing right in the heat of the day although on the final day i ended up mowing right through the heat at the end of the video i give my new pricing model on per acre and per hour for this type of job and the things that are always hard to factor in and that you can't anticipate is just like how bumpy the ground is if the ground's rough you have to drive slow and there's no getting around that then there's unexpected obstacles i underestimated how much it would slow me down going under all the trees on this property things like that are just hard to predict [Music] all right well i actually made it out here on time today the official sunrise is 6 28 and it's like 6 19. so i'm gonna actually get the bush hog on the ground before sunrise the only thing i've got left to do is i'm going to sharpen the bush hog blades i've heard people say you don't even need to sharpen them i've never sharpened mine and i've used the heck out of it but i think just touching them up a little bit will help it cut this grass better the other thing i did today that i've never done before is refuel during the middle of a job as i burn about a gallon an hour on some types of work it's less than a gallon an hour and so i've never done a job that used an entire tank of gas but i did yesterday i got seven hours of mowing in used up this whole seven gallon tank so we're fueled up it's nice and cool out here i should be able to really lay into what's left of this property i'm guessing after seven hours yesterday i've probably done 30 to 40 percent of the job but it's really hard to measure that [Music] i agree that these blades get the heck beat out of them and putting an edge on them just going to make them chip faster and you grind and chip and grind and chip and you're just removing all the metal off of these you know thick heavy blades but we're cutting grass and i think it's going gonna help so we'll see [Music] [Music] all right out of any job i've ever done i've had the most hiccups ever with this one i mean part of that's just because it was time consuming so there's more opportunity for things to go wrong but um i broke a sheer coming off the gearbox no big deal probably actually cracked it doing a different job because i haven't hit much doing this you know occasionally a rock or something but nothing really big or killing the tractor kind of jam up but i didn't have one with me so that cost me a bunch of time i had to go get go get some shear bolts hopefully this will go on pretty easy and i can get back to it okay right there is the shear bolt and that goes on the back side so i guess the fact that this is the first shear bolt i broke is just a testament to the quality of the slip clutches [Music] so [Music] [Music] well you saw me there blowing off all the dust and grass off the tractor and that was a big problem that i just never had before um i don't know what the difference was about this grass but it very quickly was building up on the grill guard and that keeps air from getting into the radiator keeps the tractor getting hotter as you go so i would stop at least once an hour and blow all that dust off now i also was talking to someone who caught a brush hog on fire because the gearbox can get hot and the top of the brush hog can get hot and it's got dead grass sitting on it as you go and i noticed you've got that same dead grass piling up around the pto shaft and on the backhoe subframe on the back of the tractor and i imagine that's getting pretty hot too so i always blew off the brush hog the front grille the radiator and the actual back of the tractor every time i stopped and of course i was also blowing all the dust off my face and my arms and everything else so the fact that i had to stop and do that all the time really slowed me down a lot [Music] [Music] for the whole project i'm gonna have about 21 hours to do 49 acres so that's about two and a half acres per hour if it was like the grass on my property which is a hay field and after the last cut almo one more time i can probably do four acres an hour but this is heavy thick stuff that slows me down i can only do two and a half acres an hour so in my case if i want to make seventy five dollars an hour and it's two and a half acres per hour then i can charge thirty dollars per acre now that i know that number thirty dollars per acre 49 acres would be 1475 dollars it's what it would cost for me to mow this now it's probably not practical for the landowner to spend that much on brush hogging they could probably get someone with a bigger tractor and a 15 foot mower they could do this really quick for half that price and i only charged them half that price because i didn't know how long it would take and i'm trying to help somebody out i find myself a lot of times just thinking more about the other person than i am myself as far as pricing because i'm not trying to earn a living from this but the more jobs i take the more i realize i'm going to have to charge that full price which would have meant turning this job down so i originally tried to turn this down and i told the landowner you know if you can find someone else with a bigger brush hog then go ahead and have them do it because it's gonna cost me too much time i'm have to overcharge you he couldn't find anyone else they have to have this done by saturday they've got their reasons that this has to be done and so finally i said i'm going to help somebody out and i gave them that price it's about half of what it should have been and i'm fine with it because this isn't how i earn my living but it puts a lot of stress on the tractor doing this all the time so i think 75 dollars an hour is a pretty good number and i hope that it's helpful for you to see what a tractor this size with a six foot bush hog can mow in an hour anyway i appreciate you taking time to watch the video just a minute you'll see links on the screen to a couple more of our videos and i'll see you next time

Channel: Rockhill farm

Views: 437,411

Keywords: 2038r, John Deere, compact tractor, 2032r, 2025r, 1025r, farm vlog, homestead, christmas tree farm, tractor review, how to, John Deere compact tractor, outdoorgans, #outdoorgans, Curtis cab, Artillian, John Deere 2038R, bush hogging, brush hogging, paid tractor work, pricing tractor work, tractor side business, making money with a tractor

Id: nsowxQsl1oo

Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 21 2021