Trug and tractor thread

[Vague]

Post your trug or vehicle of choice

 

[Unarmed Gunman]

dafuck is a trug?

 

[Scatty]

I like my Kubota BX23s so far

 

[ChefBourgeoisie]

I'm still looking. I need something a bit north of 50HP (maybe on up to around 90HP), diesel, and easy to work on. And hell, let's be realistic, I need it to have a cab, oem or aftermarket don't care which. So less late 60s, more mid 70s. I'm not opposed to JD, but I get tired of hearing old-timers talk as if Jesus Himself rode down from Heaven on one.

I wonder about the usefulness of a front PTO, too. Probably 'cause I don't know what in the hell I'm doing (I think I once road on a tractor when I was 8 or 9, grampa had a Ford 9n or maybe a different model). There is this cotton harvester, the JD pull-type stripper, #33.

These were pulled behind of course, but the people who talk about them on the tractor forums will complain about how the tractor was driving over the top of the cotton and ruining the best of the bolls before this thing ever got to them. So I wonder, if someone got ahold of some junked self-propelled cotton stripper, might one cannibalize it, and build something you could put on the front of a general purpose tractor? I want (low) single digit acres of cotton, not hundreds of acres. Even if you put something on the front, do you even really need pto up there for it? They don't for the front end loaders. Do I need need anything custom like that, or would the pictured equipment be good enough?

Anyway, something like the above (Oliver made a few two-row cotton pull-behinds as well), a pull-type combine, something for hay, a potato harvester. A good tractor, a running spare of the same model. That's what I'm hoping for. It's not even about the money, these damned things seem to go cheap if you can ever find them.

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

John Deere used to be pretty good. Now they're just green Yanmars. You can probably get a good deal on any sort of implement if you keep your eyes open, are patient, and can travel several hundred miles.

I don't know what the utlity of a front PTO would be. I wasn't even aware that was a common option. Doesn't that harvester work from the side?

 

[ChefBourgeoisie]

I don't know what the utlity of a front PTO would be. I wasn't even aware that was a common option.

Apparently, these are all aftermarket. If someone offers it OEM, it's some shitty Indian/Turkish manufacturer. But, people mostly put mowers/bush-hogs on them, best I can tell. Little interest in that myself.

Most people are just putting hayforks or loaders, maybe the occasional backhoe (fronthoe?). Just need hydraulics for those.

Doesn't that harvester work from the side?

Yeh, most do. This cotton one doesn't look like it (and it's rare enough I can't find a video of someone using one). The hitch and shaft look like they're too short to drive out to the side. I think it just grabbed whatever cotton you didn't stomp down driving over it (wheels high and/or wide). If we were talking a grain combine, it'd definitely be out to the side, perhaps quite a bit if it had one of the bigger 4/6 row headers.

But there were also a few weird ones way back (1940s-1950s?) that did it differently still. This one's for corn... look at how fucking awful that must have been to take off so you could do something else with your tractor. If you did have a pto and 3-point up front, then most of this maybe could've mounted on those, would be easier to take off and on, etc. And, you could still move all the product to the back, so the auger or whatever could put it in a a hopper/wagon. I confess it was a dumb idea, the front pto thing, sometimes I blabber like that to give other people a chance to correct me.

I've seen a few like this for cotton, but on those they'd put the big bin up on top, and you'd drive the damned thing backwards (no shit). I honestly don't know how you'd attach/detach any of these without a lift or gantry or something.

The pull-type "off to the side" ones aren't quite as flawed, but they're supposedly harder to drive obviously. Very difficult to turn at the end of the row too, and don't have much capacity (so big operations with them would quickly become frustrating). But, I don't want a big operation, and I do wonder if you could just shape your field to be one big stretch of 2/4 rows or whatever so there's not much turning. So much to figure out with this stuff from scratch.

On a few other forums, people have asked me why the hell I wouldn't want to do all this by hand with a scythe. Months later, I still can't tell if they're just screwing with me. I like the idea of being able to harvest in a few hours and then have time to do other things, if I could just figure out the right recipe for machines.

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

I confess it was a dumb idea, the front pto thing

I don't know that it's a dumb idea at all.

On a few other forums, people have asked me why the hell I wouldn't want to do all this by hand with a scythe. Months later, I still can't tell if they're just screwing with me. I

Fucking crunchy hippies are exasperating for any agriculturalist looking for infotmation online. "Oh, you have a squeeze chute? We just train our goats to stand still!" --person with 3 entire goats.

The idea of harvesting an economically relevant amount of cotton by hand is horrifying. There's a reason we used slaves for that! I am thinking of getting a scythe so I can harvest about a thousand square feet of wheat and make my own flour, but I'm not confusing myself into thinking that's not just play.

 

[IdiotPlusPlus]

The hitch and shaft look like they're too short to drive out to the side.

I dunno how much work it would be, but could you replace the PTO shaft with a longer one and weld a offset hitch to it so it becomes a side harvest anyways? it looks like it would only need a foot or so horizontal to be outside a tractors wheel? tbh the only tractors I have been around were old Massy Fergusons that were used for slashing grass in winter and moving equipment around the grandparents small farm on a platform lol

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

If you're going 4 mph with a one foot wide harvester, in a perfect world it will take you 2 hours to do one acre. If it's 4 feet wide, 2 acres an hour, which is still pretty dang slow if you're talking say 160 acres. Even at 4 acres an hour, so an 8 foot wide implement, you're talking 40 hours if you by some miracle had zero overlap and never needed fuel and so on.

I'm just thinking about this sort of thing. The bigger the tractor or purpose built machinery, the more cheaply it can do the same job, in terms of time and fuel, but of course the equipment itself costs more.

So to do sodbustery type things, finding the ideal tractor.size will be key

 

[Pretend To Imagine]

 

[ChefBourgeoisie]

If it's 4 feet wide, 2 acres an hour, which is still pretty dang slow if you're talking say 160 acres

This is true. The old stuff just doesn't scale up in the ways that modern farming wants and requires. And while it's quite obvious that we'll all need some sort of financial income... if one were, for instance, to have all the wheat/flour/bread one could want, then that's just one last thing you need cash to buy.

We need to start thinking about the yields that most of the big crops can manage on a single acre. Potatoes are north of 20,000lbs in the best locations, but thousands of pounds still even in the places that aren't so great for them. Sugar beets are similar, well north of 18,000lbs where they're grown (and it's something like 10% yield, so 1800 pounds of granulated sugar). Cotton will do 3 bales an acre at about 1500lbs each, but I keep finding some articles that claim some are getting 6 bales on irrigated land. Corn, beans, grains. All of these are many thousands of pounds per acre (don't make me do bushels-to-pounds conversion, ugh).

What you would want for yourself of these amounts to fractions of an acre. Only exception I see are grains, since they fatten up animals nicely, and hay. Even for those, you want a few acres worth for a relatively large herd, and of course hay, probably want more than a couple acres of that (but not 160 acres!). These are all reasonable acreage for a smaller tractor, and the equipment we're discussing. And, if you can afford a working spare for everything, maybe using those in tandem if you have to hurry isn't out of the question.

So to do sodbustery type things, finding the ideal tractor.size will be key

Well, if you did want the pull-type harvesters, some of these have some minimums. Most of the two-row potato/beet harvesters want like 100HP or really close to it. But even just say, some of the last JD combines were really big and needed as much (a model 30 or 42 would probably be ok with even 50HP). There are some other variables (it's easier to pull things over flat land than up hills and stuff like that, some soil's harder to dig into than others), but older used tractors on up to and above 80HP aren't going to break the bank. Plenty of models hit those numbers not long after WWII.

More than just horsepower, are some other things to consider. While newer equipment can be configured to accept 540/1000rpm off of the PTO, some of the older stuff can't. So a tractor that can do both rpm would be good. I think those started showing up in the 1960s. There is the question of fuels, and there are 3 types: gasoline, diesel, and propane. The first is completely useless. The second is thinkable. The third is pretty fucking weird, and I'm not sure I understand why that was so big... but on Craigslist and Facebook marketplace I keep seeing propane tractors in such numbers that it must have made some sort of sense that I just can't figure. And, I don't think a cab/AC is just a comfort thing... so you're going to want something that you can at least put an aftermarket cab on.

 

[Cirrhosis_of_Liver]

When I got a tractor with a roof, it was a revelation. Then, I got a tractor withnair conditioning. You've said you're in West Texas, so yeah, AC will allow you to do so much more work and with so much clearer a head that it's very well worth the money.

Diversifying your crops allows you to use a smaller tractor, since you'll be spreading out your workload over different harvest, planting, and spraying schedules. It's just better all around unless you have a million dollar combine and a crop duster.

Gasoline tractors still running is pretty damned impressive. I have seen propane tractors in action; I don't get the point, either.

I am just thinking about row crops because it's interesting. I actually am.working on an irrigated hay field. I actually intend to turn it into silvopasture with pecans in rows allowing easy irrigation, shade, haying, and all around a diverse intensive use of my lowest lying land.

I drive many hundreds of miles of West Texas and New Mexico on the daily. Irrigation makes a tremendous difference for cotton plants. They're in bloom right now, very pretty.