How much to charge/

[tmc_31]

Wow, I wish I was a little closer. Have you got a friend with a tractor/mower? You might be able to gang up on the project and get it done in a reasonable time frame.

I have been tractor mowing now for several years, but only recently have I been trying to make it and brush work a major income producer for me. It is always interesting to see the replies to a question like this, as I would expect, the prices are all over the board. My price for this job would be about in the middle.

Several months ago, when I decided to get more heavily involved with tractor shredding/brush clearing I did a search on this forum and read everything I could find about the subject. There is some good information here (and some bad too). The collective experience on this forum and my own personal experiences helped me formulate my own price guide for mowing.

The first thing I did was figure out what it cost me to buy, own and operate my equipment by performing a life cycle costing on a new tractor and shredder similar to the ones that I currently own. This includes things like purchase cost, interest on the loan,fuel, maintenance, unexpected repairs, insurance, depreciation etc. I broke that cost down to an hourly rate based on an annual expected usage. I added my labor cost/hr and a reasonable margin for profit. The end result for that exercise gave me an hourly rate for the tractor/shredder/operator. From there I figured out how much acreage I could mow with my rig under perfect conditions. I also added one hour on each end of the mowing job for transportation. At that point I developed a matrix of pricing that ranged from $47/acre for up to 5 acres ($240.00 minimum) to $19.99/acre for 640 acres (I would be hesitant to mow 640 acres with my equipment, but I sure would mow 100 acres). For 100 acres I would start out asking for $21.13/acre. A couple of assumptions here, first and foremost is the acreage is flat with no obstructions. Also, the grass is fairly easily mow-able with my equipment and not more than 3-4' high.

These mowing jobs are rarely perfect. So the rate/acre is just a starting place for me. I won't take on a mowing project without looking at it first. I will take a careful look at the site, then verify the acreage on Google earth and apply any modifiers I deem necessary before giving a price to my customer.

I lost a mowing job a few months ago because the customer told me there was 14 acres in it when there was actually only 10 acres in the job. I didn't verify the acreage and lost the job to someone who under bid me by about $125.00. Thing is, at my rate I would have been $20.00 cheaper than my competitor if I had not relied on what the customer had told me and had measured the acreage like I should have.

My current mowing equipment is a NH TND70D tractor with a Rhino SE7 shredder. I plan on mowing at 4.5 MPH and in good conditions can maintain this or better and still get a good cut. I also performed the same analysis as above using a new Rhino 12' batwing shredder. I found that on projects over 25 acres the cost is cheaper than with the 7' shredder that I currently own. Maybe one of these days I will get a job that will justify a $9000.00 expenditure for a new shredder. I figure that with my current equipment I could mow that 100 acres in 29 hours. With the batwing I could do it in 21 hours (under perfect conditions).

Keep in mind that the figures I have thrown out here are for my geographical area and they work for me and my circumstances. YMMV. Again they are just a starting point when negotiating with a customer.

There are a lot of people on this board who have much more experience with tractor mowing than I. One of several who stand out is "farmswithjunk". I believe he has a commercial mowing business in Florida. I would suggest that you search on his posts and read them carefully. He gives a lot of good information.

If I were you, and I wanted to do this project, assuming I had the time, I would go for it even with your smaller equipment.

Best of luck,

Tim

 

[Rock knocker]

Thank you Dr TMC

 

[Richard]

Sounds like you've reached a conclusion.

My house is in the middle of the wifes family farm, it's about 250 acres total, estimated 80/100 fields and the rest is woods. (my FIL's estimate)

I don't personally own a tractor (mine is a backhoe/loader)

Wifes uncle has an International 444 and uses a 5' rotary cutter. He's cut the farm for years and today, has little hearing left because of the tractor/muffler situation.

I took over trying to cut the farm since the fathe in law & uncle in law are getting older. I found that it would take me literally all summer to get the place cut (not all open fields, lots of between trees, around stuff to cut)

Finally, it took so long to get it cut I finally stopped. It simply was not worth my time, effort AND fuel bill (I used their equipment but paid for the diesel).

About three years went by and the place started looking pretty ratty. I was pretty resolute that I was done trying to help the team with such insufficient tools.

Interestingly, the next summer, my FIL at the urging of his son, bought an International 880 or something like that and a HD 10 foot HD Rhino cutter.

NOW, you can cut most of the place over the weekend if you put in a good day.

Old tractor: Bog down on hills, have to cut in low range, first gear most of the time, less than 5' swath
New tractor: Can cut in 3'rd gear (no idea of ground speed) and double the width of cut

I'm glad I got stubborn

 

[LD1]

I am in agreement with others here that say to walk away. Unless ofcourse you dont mind spending a week at it AND if the guy dont mind paying 4 grand for the job. In that case, I'd say go for it.

But do double check the acreage. Here is a cool thing I like and use it for my cutting jobs and I find it to be pretty acurate. Google Planimeter

Just locate the field, zoom in, and outline it. It will give acreage at the bottom. And I really cant take full credit either. This was posted on TBN here about 3 or 4 months ago also.

 

[tmc_31]

Thanks LD1, for the reference to Google Planimeter! I used to do a screen capture from Google Earth and import it into my CAD program (Draftsight) then scale it and outline the area with a polyline. Then I would get the area inside the polyline in sqft and convert to acres.

Google Planimeter will be a great tool for me:thumbsup:

Tim

 

[joshuabardwell]

Thanks LD1, for the reference to Google Planimeter! I used to do a screen capture from Google Earth and import it into my CAD program (Draftsight) then scale it and outline the area with a polyline. Then I would get the area inside the polyline in sqft and convert to acres.

Google Planimeter will be a great tool for me:thumbsup:

Tim

Same here. What a PITA.

 

[Misfire]

If you do work for money with your tractor, you are conducting a business, with all that entails. Think licenses, permits, environmental regs, tax implications, and liability (insurance). If you already have all that covered, no problems, but if you don't, I suggest thinking about it before proceeding.

 

[LD1]

sounds like that would be a PITA.

I used to do something similar, rather just used the scale and a ruler on my moniter to guessitmate. but odd shapes, oblong ells, triangles, etc were hard to do.

Someone here mentioned the planimeter a few months back and I have been using it every sense. I can ecev zoom in on my 30x50 bole barn, outline it, and it comes up exact. Same as my 5 acres of land, right on the money:thumbsup:

The only thing I dont like is that it uses google. Google IMO is by far the worst of the 3 aerial satellite veiw programs I use. It is always the worst resolution and most outdated. Infact, it shows my property image as it was in 2006-2007. So it is 5+ years outdated.

Mapquest dont zoom in as far, but has higher resolition and is more current.

Here are some examples for those interested.

This is a google.com map

Notice there is no pole-barn beside the house. I built this in 2007 through 2009. Also the cluster of trees at the north west corner just to the east of the drive. These were removed summer of 2006. VERY OLD map.

This is mapquest


Pole Barn is at least underroof. This was done october 2007. It also shows the concrete sidewalk connecting the house and garage. That was june 2008. But it dont show the front deck/goldfish pond, so it has to be older than summer of 2010 when I did that.

This one is weather.com map. Best so far. Zooms in the most with good resolution and most current.


It shows the front deck and goldfish pond as well as the back playset I built in august of 2011 for the little tike. So it is newer than august 2011. But dont show the pond down front I just had dug last month. But it is still within a year of being current.

 

[MESSMAKER]

I don't know your market, but that works out to $24.50/ hr for a rig, operator, profit etc. You could easily justify tripling those rates. It is better to charge more and work less than the reverse.

After many years of construction mangement in the Puget Sound area, I would say that $70-100/hr is a fair price. It is up to you if you want to charge a fee for "in and out". For say, three acres travel would be justified. For a hundred acres, you should probably eat travel.

You may be right. The batwing guys would do it by the acre. They get $20-25 per acre( probably get it done for less than $2500). If you are going to get a job that size, you have to be competitive. With a small unit, you can do all right at around $250 per day. If you can get $1500-2000 in your pocket at the end of the week. You will have earned it.

 

[deepNdirt]

That's just enough information to turn the job down. I think I'll pass and recommend he find someone with swather and baler.

Thanks guys.

Smart Move:thumbsup: you know how expensive just one breakdown can be,

for instance last year I was in a subdivision comunity where the homeowners all chipp in to have the vacant and grown over lots bushhog down, the lots average 1 acre each, I was on a roll with my cut tractor and 4 ft. cutter, mowing about 1 lot per 1 1/2 hour , the lot's were within the same comunity so I give a discount rate of 35 per hour, was roughly 50 per lot, toward the end of the day I had worked my way through 4 lots and on to the back of the subdivision where there sat a lot, You know! the ones that are left for basement houses, needless to say the grade was a bit out of level, But I thought I could handle it if went slow an careful, Turns out this lot was the trash lot of the comunity scrap materials and brick/rock/cement chunks all hidden by tall weed grass, after running over some of this stuff realizing there was no cutting around thuis mess I headed for the street, and as luck has it, on the way out I ran over something ripping one of my rear tires wide open, Tires are not cheap, it took almost all of what I made on that Sat. to replace the darn tire, this was a minor breakdown but it proved to me something my wife has always warned me about,
( Using my tractor and equipment to do for others will one day break down and I won't have it to
be able to do for myself )

 

[tmc_31]

LD1, it is a pain to use my old method but, it beat the heck out of walking around a large property with a measuring wheel in the hot sun. The Google Planimeter will make this chore much easier. I still will be walking the properties (or riding on a gas powered raised golf cart) to get an idea of what kind of obstructions might be lying in wait

Again, thanks

Tim

 

[creekbend]

That's just enough information to turn the job down. I think I'll pass and recommend he find someone with swather and baler.

Thanks guys.

I think that is probably a wise decision. If the weeds and grass are fairly tall and haven't been mowed in awhile, there remains the possibility that various unseen problems are concealed in the undergrowth that would cause damage to your Tractor and Equipment. This could most definitely result in costly repairs and become a losing proposition in the long run. Just a thought?

 

[bcp]

The only thing I dont like is that it uses google. Google IMO is by far the worst of the 3 aerial satellite veiw programs I use. It is always the worst resolution and most outdated. Infact, it shows my property image as it was in 2006-2007. So it is 5+ years outdated.

Check your own area with each photo server for the most recent photos. Weather.com has the oldest for mine.

Bruce

 

[LD1]

Check your own area with each photo server for the most recent photos. Weather.com has the oldest for mine.

Bruce

I figured there would be differences. I wonder what everyone else experiences are. Everything I have looked at around central ohio, weather.com is the clearest and newest.

With weather being the oldest in your area, who is newer? mapquest or google? and who has the better clarity/resolution?

 

[tmc_31]

In my area, Google Earth has the latest imagery. The image of my house is a little over a year old. Also the resolution is as good as any of them. I tried the MapQuest and was not able to zoom in enough for it to be useful.

I have been using Google Earth for a long time. I use it to preview job sites all over the nation. What I have found is that usually the metropolitan areas have the best resolution and the rural areas (unless it is an area of special interest) has the worst. I have seen a marked improvement in general of the resolution all over the US over the years.

In my day job, I install sports lighting equipment for baseball fields, football fields etc. I have found that I can create working drawings from a Google Earth image and that it will be accurate to within a few feet when I finally get to the job site. Before Google Earth I used Terraserver. I had a subscription to it. It was a bit cumbersome to use, and the imagery was not nearly as up to date as what we have available to us now. The Google Planimeter also is a little cumbersome to use although the imagery is very good. I wish Google would include that feature in the Google earth measuring tool.

Tim

 

[Todd727]

Weather.com is just using Bing maps, which is Microsoft Maps, which I believe is still TerraServer.

 

[tmc_31]

I was just at the Google Earth site to make a suggestion that they expand their ruler features to include an area function. Before I sent that request, I checked out Google Earth Pro. Low and behold, the area function is part of the ruler tool in the Pro version. Pretty cool, but a $399.00/yr I think I'll pass. Google Planimeter is looking really good to me now:thumbsup:

Tim

 

[tmc_31]

My apologies walterc, we kind of got a little off topic here. I hope you got all of you questions answered. If not, please chime in!!

Tim

 

[LD1]

Weather.com is just using Bing maps, which is Microsoft Maps, which I believe is still TerraServer.

Not true. At least in my area.

Here is bing of my house. (if you can even make anything out)


It is by far the worst of them. Definatally NOT what weather.com uses as you can clearly see.

 

[Mrfarmertrees]

I've been mowing part time since 1992, back then I used a small 5' mower. Every time I mowed a large tract something would break on the mower or the tractor. The equipment just was not heavy enough to take the beating of the terrain. Kept buying larger equipment until now I have a 90 HP tractor and 15' batwing. Just like several folks have already mentioned I read a lot on the forums about what other contractors are doing (especially FWJ) and have made several changes in my business practices such as general liability, CDL, commercial insurance. Mr TMC_31 had an excellent post on page 3 of this thread.

After my minimum is met, I charge $30+ an acre. I base my estimates on mowing 5 acres an hour. Unless there are a lot of trees I can hit that mark pretty close on most jobs. I don't give discounts unless I mow monthly for the same customer. My reasoning is that I could be doing another job making the money I'd lose money if I charge less. Being insurance poor is very expensive, so far my insurance company doesn't give me any discounts to pass on to my customers. So I would have to charge at least $3K for the job. Most of my jobs are 10 to 30 acres.

Would I do 100 acres with a 5' mower? No way. It's to hard on small equipment, not to mention the toll it does to the body. I couldn't hardly walk for a day after mowing 10 - 12 hours on a small tractor. And more importantly unless I have insurance the risk isn't worth it.

Good luck on your decision.