northSun
New member
I've been mowing our 8 acres of fields (mixed grass, wild roses, willow and poplar saplings) 1-2x/year with a Honda HRC216 commercial 21" bagging lawn mower and using the resulting coarse clippings for mulch on the garden. It works well except that it takes way too much time.
Time for an upgrade. My wife is telling me to buy something! The goal is something that will do the same job very reliably, but much faster and hopefully a little more often. The fields are all sloping and a bit rough (though not too rough for the 21" Honda set to max mowing height, which is 4"). Durability under hard use is very important, as is reliable bagging this kind of taller/rougher material (remember the small saplings and rose bushes). We are 10 hours from the nearest Kubota dealer, and no closer to any others. I generally try to buy commercial/industrial stuff rather than residential as it seems I use equipment hard (if I buy a wooden handle rake, I will break it...).
We are considering Kubota zero-turns, and not sure what we need to look for to get the reliable performance and durability for this use.
We've also looked at John Deeres a bit, but orange--at least in CUTs--seems to be more popular with the neighbours.
Is there anything else we should consider, or would a Kubota zero turn make sense? Which one(s)? Would you go diesel? I'm thinking perhaps the extra torque would be a good thing, though it does take us up to more than double the cost of the base zero turn.
For other jobs (clearing 1 km / 0.6 mi driveway of 6"-3' of snow at a time, brush hogging, maintaining driveway and accompanying ditches, moving dirt & rocks, lifting heavy stuff (2500-3000 lbs) off trailer occasionally and moving it around, making wood chips, etc), we are leaning towards a CTL. A skid-steer would work, except that we have a lot of steep terrain (2200' water line trail up 250' elevation to creek with most of the elevation gain in probably 500' among other things). We haven't ruled out a larger tractor to do everything. But we'd like to avoid a snow blower as far as possible as we have a lot of rocks falling on the lower half of our driveway (cut into a bank to come up side of bluff 200' above road) and replacing shear pins in our BCS Berta snow blower sometimes happens several times in as many minutes). Tractors don't seem like they'd work great to scoop snow off to the side without getting stuck in or sliding over the side. I'm very comfortable operating skid-steers (spent hours in them as a teenager and became a fast operator even in tight spaces--could use the machine to do stuff other people would do by hand). The XBoom option for a mini-excavator looks interesting, but I think the slow travel speed might be an issue. Also, I'm not sure the auxiliary hydraulics would be up to the tasks of brush hogging and possibly snow blowing.
In summary, the right tractor might be able to do everything (though it looks like it would need to be large to lift 2500-3000 lb pallets off trailer). We are leaning towards a CTL (Kubota?) and zero-turn (Kubota, want a heavy duty one) at the moment. Is there such a thing as a bagging mower for a CTL/skid-steer? If so, maybe we could skip the zero-turn.
All thoughts/recommendations welcome. I'd rather second guess these purchases before than after buying.
Time for an upgrade. My wife is telling me to buy something! The goal is something that will do the same job very reliably, but much faster and hopefully a little more often. The fields are all sloping and a bit rough (though not too rough for the 21" Honda set to max mowing height, which is 4"). Durability under hard use is very important, as is reliable bagging this kind of taller/rougher material (remember the small saplings and rose bushes). We are 10 hours from the nearest Kubota dealer, and no closer to any others. I generally try to buy commercial/industrial stuff rather than residential as it seems I use equipment hard (if I buy a wooden handle rake, I will break it...).
We are considering Kubota zero-turns, and not sure what we need to look for to get the reliable performance and durability for this use.
We've also looked at John Deeres a bit, but orange--at least in CUTs--seems to be more popular with the neighbours.
Is there anything else we should consider, or would a Kubota zero turn make sense? Which one(s)? Would you go diesel? I'm thinking perhaps the extra torque would be a good thing, though it does take us up to more than double the cost of the base zero turn.
For other jobs (clearing 1 km / 0.6 mi driveway of 6"-3' of snow at a time, brush hogging, maintaining driveway and accompanying ditches, moving dirt & rocks, lifting heavy stuff (2500-3000 lbs) off trailer occasionally and moving it around, making wood chips, etc), we are leaning towards a CTL. A skid-steer would work, except that we have a lot of steep terrain (2200' water line trail up 250' elevation to creek with most of the elevation gain in probably 500' among other things). We haven't ruled out a larger tractor to do everything. But we'd like to avoid a snow blower as far as possible as we have a lot of rocks falling on the lower half of our driveway (cut into a bank to come up side of bluff 200' above road) and replacing shear pins in our BCS Berta snow blower sometimes happens several times in as many minutes). Tractors don't seem like they'd work great to scoop snow off to the side without getting stuck in or sliding over the side. I'm very comfortable operating skid-steers (spent hours in them as a teenager and became a fast operator even in tight spaces--could use the machine to do stuff other people would do by hand). The XBoom option for a mini-excavator looks interesting, but I think the slow travel speed might be an issue. Also, I'm not sure the auxiliary hydraulics would be up to the tasks of brush hogging and possibly snow blowing.
In summary, the right tractor might be able to do everything (though it looks like it would need to be large to lift 2500-3000 lb pallets off trailer). We are leaning towards a CTL (Kubota?) and zero-turn (Kubota, want a heavy duty one) at the moment. Is there such a thing as a bagging mower for a CTL/skid-steer? If so, maybe we could skip the zero-turn.
All thoughts/recommendations welcome. I'd rather second guess these purchases before than after buying.
