Hey all! I've been lurking for a bit but I've yet to see a use case quite like mine.
We recently bought a large ~1.5 acre property and historic home in a small town center in Maine. Originally a small horse farm, it was at one point extensively landscaped like a park, with lots of garden plots and about 60 old growth maples and while it's not a big property, it's been a fairly high maintenance one for its small size. The whole property is on a gently sloping hillside with about an acre of lawn, which currently takes me about 90+ minutes to mow with a commercial walk behind (there's a ZTR in our near future). On top of that, it had been neglected for a couple of decades when we bought it, and we're in the process of digging it out from the overgrowth and restoring it to its former glory.
We've got a long list of major landscaping projects planned, including building stone stairs and doing a lot of terracing/retaining wall construction to build foundations for an outdoor dining pavilion as well as a workshop/sugar shack/garage for the ZTR. In addition, the 60 maples generate about 20 cubic yards of leaves every year, which has been "fun" to manage and sustains a leaf pile that's about 45'x25'x6' deep. We're also doing the millennial hobby farmer thing and expanding a large vegetable garden and I'm growing a large hobbyist/small commercial scale maple syrup operation.
With the cost of getting any work done these days, I figure I'm easily at $30-40k or more to get all of the outstanding landscaping projects done, and between moving sap barrels around the yard during syrup season, gardening/landscaping odds and ends, and turning over our large compost pile, a loader would be nice to have. Am I crazy for thinking that a tractor more than pays for itself with the landscaping/earthmoving projects and afterwards becomes a useful tool for managing a small but high maintenance property while raising a growing family and often being pressed for time? What size/hp range should I be considering?
The only rear implements I'd likely be running are a box blade, a small rotary cultivator, and probably a wood
chipper. I'd like to be able to lift/move ~800lbs for the landscaping projects. I was thinking that a 25hp emissions-exempt compact with loaded tires would be a good place to start. My local dealerships sell Deere, Kubota, Kioti, Massey Ferguson, and Yanmar, and they all seem pretty decent. If I even need a tractor, what should I look for?