So first I have to give giant props to my hubby. He is the equipment-finder extraordinaire, the king of the deal, the guy that can find the needle-in-the-haystack. He spends countless hours looking for just the right thing for us at a killer price and I admire the heck out of him for it. I don’t know anyone that can do what he does.
Tractors are pretty cool machines. They’re sturdy little stud muffins that just hunker down and do their jobs. Pretty much whatever you throw at them, within reason, like an old 4WD that goes wherever you ask it.
We’ve been looking at tractors almost since we found the farm. We’ve looked at Deere, Kubota, Mahindra, Massey Ferguson and New Holland. Pricing is astounding. Let me say if you want to buy a tractor and you’d like to spend more money than my first house on it, you can absolutely do it. And if you want a giant green combine they can be well into the half a million dollar range! Luckily that’s way more than we need. Or so I keep telling my better half. 🙂
There are so many SO MANY variables when buying a tractor. Horsepower, PTO, implement hookup, number of hydraulic connections, does it come with a loader? how wide? And then how big should the implements be, which ones do we need, which ones will we use once or twice and could rent?
About two weeks ago Brett called me and said let’s go do lunch. So we’re eating at Zaxby’s and he gets all serious and says “I think this is the tractor.” It’s a Mahindra 6010 HST (hydrostatic transmission for you newbies – there’s some good reading here) and a 4WD.
And lo and behold, he’d done it. Found us the perfect machine, at a steal because of a web posting error, with just a few hours on it in a sheltered environment. The only thing we have to do is replace the tires.
You see, our tractor has racing slicks. They’re not technically racing slicks, but since the tractor lived on a golf course and maintained turf, it had to have super wide rims and turf tires to be able to maneuver without crushing or leaving wide ruts in the grass. Of course this also means it live a Thurston Howell life as a tractor on a swanky golf course, so it wasn’t subjected to a lot of difficult pulling, mowing, plowing, and the like.
When our friend Justin the transporter delivered it (he’d also delivered our Mahindra XUV from from Ocala), I giggled at the racing equipment he’d brought me. And he laughed too.
Nevertheless we’ve been tooling around in a nearby location learning how to drive it, back it, raise and lower the bucket and just generally get familiar with it. Now it’s over at the Mahindra dealer getting the once over to make sure that it’s good to be a farm tractor and everything is good to go.
