Discover Versatile Compact Tractors
(Page 6 of 9)
April/May 2006
By Bryan Welch
The big hydraulic arms on which your loader bucket rides can be useful in a number of other ways. If you feed your livestock from big, round hay bales, a bale spear mounts conveniently on the quick-attach brackets of modern loader arms (see photo). The loader arms provide the most powerful and versatile method for moving big bales. Forklift attachments also can be mounted on the arms.
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ATTACHMENT OPTIONS
The price of a new tractor, though it may be daunting, isn’t complete without the attachments you’ll need to put your machine to work. Besides the obvious benefits of mowers and front-end loaders, you need to consider the other ways in which your tractor can be of service.
Rear-mounted rotary tillers (also called rototillers) are extremely powerful and handy for large-scale gardens and landscapes (see photo). These attachments generally are powered by the rear PTO. They work most effectively on tractors with an independently controlled PTO. (On older tractors, the speed of spinning attachments is controlled by the speed of the engine.)
Before you buy, try out a tractor with an independent PTO control and a switch that allocates power to the attachment slowly, allowing the blades to start slow and then speed up automatically, such as John Deere’s Twenty Series compact utility tractors. The modern controls prolong the life of your attachments and will help you manage your land gently.
A good 4-foot-wide rototiller can prepare a half-acre garden for planting in less than an hour. If you’ve been running a walk-behind tiller or hand tilling, then you owe it to yourself to give a tractor-mounted tiller a try. However, in some soils, the tractor and the tiller can have unintended consequences: Your soil can be compacted by the weight of the tractor, creating a hardpan condition that inhibits the growth of plants’ deep roots.
A long, unpaved driveway calls for an open blade, a box blade (see photo) or perhaps both. The box blade is the more specialized tool for driveway maintenance. As you drag the box blade along your driveway, it scrapes up the gravel and dirt from the high points and deposits them in the low spots. The box blade greatly simplifies this process.
An open blade essentially will do the same work, but it also tends to push materials out to each side, which necessitates a number of passes in order to create a flat, consistent roadbed. It will take you a while to create a system for driveway maintenance with an open blade. The open blade has the advantage, however, of being useful for pushing snow off the road or driveway. Box blades quickly fill up with snow and are not practical for this task.
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