Garden Tractors for the Small Country Place

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Trudging along in the dust, racket, and exhaust fumes of the mini-tornado created by a rotary mower in the bugs and sweaty heat of a summer's day is perfectly suitable to teach one's school-age offspring how repetitive can be the process of earning an honest buck, but becomes more than just tiresome if your land stretches out to more than a half-acre or so. Indeed, so hated is lawn-mowing that the single most detested, thus neglected and abused machine in the homeowners inventory is the poor rotary mower. According to industry insiders, it's when the eldest child leaves home that the typical homeowner exchanges the walk behind demon rotary for a "riding mower" or "lawn tractor." And when the townsman or suburbanite makes the big move to a larger country place with a big garden, pasture, and livestock, the "lawn" tractor is traded for a larger "garden" tractor, for an even more capable "compact" tractor or finally for a full-size modern or vintage "farm" or "industrial" tractor.

In the text of this article, we'll examine your practical options in riding tractors. We'll offer suggestions for how to decide what size machine to buy, whether and how to buy it new or used, where to find it ...then show how to perform routine maintenance and minor repairs of the machine you choose.

Evolution of the Small Tractor

By the 1940s, the farmer's mule had been largely replaced by tractors ranging from huge diesel crawlers capable of pulling multiple-bottom gang-plows through the vast wheat fields of Alberta and Kansas to nimble and narrow-tire little gas-powered "Cub"size machines designed for small-plot truck gardens in the Connecticut River or San Fernando valleys.

Following the end of World War II, a longtime country-to-city migration trend reversed, and those who were able abandoned decaying city centers-initially moving to near-town suburbs, and later to the outskirts of small towns and then out into the real country.

Lawns became too large to mow with a reel mower. Ignoring haughty disdain from the old-line reel-mower manufacturers, innovators developed the gas-engine-powered rotary mower by downsizing the concept behind the Brush Hog-a tractormounted rotary flail enclosed in a steel housing used by farmers and highway departments to clear grown-up fields and roadside scrub. Today, the old reel-mower makers are long defunct and such names as Simplicity, LawnBoy, Toro/WheelHorse and Snapper survive as full-line lawn and garden equipment makers.

Most large pre-1970s farm tractors are rusting in barns and on the back lots of farm implement dealers, while the small pre-'60s models-Farmall `A's and Cubs, Ford 8Ns and comparable small-size models from John Deere, J. I. Case, AllisChalmers and other old-lines-were given a new lease on life in 1947 when Woods Equipment Company of Oregon, Illinois, adapted the rotary flail into the multiple-blade under-mount mower. Made to fit more than 200 mounts, a Woods can mow a 6-foot wide swath of grass or light brush at a rate of up to three acres an hour, enabling practically any antique tractor to serve on into its seventh or eighth decade-as an estate mower.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print