i have a JD front end bale stabber and we switched the lower two short stabber for the top, long ones. That top spear unscrews and you have a pallet spearer Still a bit wide for a lot of pallets, but it works with pallets on a sideways entry.
You could get a bale spear for the back end and have that same ballast and carry two at a time…
we call em brushhogs here
A few have probably said, “Darn, this big tractor won’t fit in the shed/ down the trail/etc.”
lol…true! i have to drop the roll bar on my new JD to park inside the shed. 25 more HP comes bigger all around. Totally worth it in performance however. I LOVE being able to lift/shove/drag just about anything. i love being able to brushhog tall weeds at more than a crawl pace.
LOL We bought our big old JD 90 horse (1976 model), off some friends with a big fancy show horse barn… lots of buildings packed into a tight area. They had had her sent out from Alberta, to use to handle big bales. But they kept on running into the sides of their barns etc, when attempting to make a turn!!! So sold her to us! Turning radius is about 60 feet!!! We call her “The Green Bastard From Points Unknown”. She’s a beast. But she doesn’t do well in cramped quarters. She’s the one we put the home built canopy on, she was “open station”.
I know of ONE instance where a brand new farm owner and horse person got a big fancy tractor that wouldn’t fit in the aisle or make the turns in their Belmont style barn, and dozens and dozens of instances where people have wished they bought something bigger.
In the first instance, the farm owner wasn’t mucking the stalls, so didn’t care that his help was carrying muck tubs to the spreader. He just thought he looked good on that big tractor dragging the ring or mowing the fields.
Evaluate whether some of the work you want to do with the tractor requires a tight turning radius and shop accordingly.
I can turn around and muck out …shove the entire winter’s worth of thatched hay and manure out of the cow barn…which is 36x72. And my JD is a 75hp. I can do it in 4wd too. WITH a blade on the rear.
That is what reverse is for.
Ours is a JD 5085, that is 85 horse power and still fits most any place and will lift big round bales and 21 small bale bundles, why we needed that size.
Interestingly, many show stables today hardly feed hay any more.
They have complete feeds as pellets in sacks.
That makes it much easier to take feed to shows than bulky bales.
Their horses look great, it takes them a while to eat all those pellets, that are based on compressed hay.
Once we don’t need to handle hay by large volumes, a smaller tractor will work fine most places.
You would think so.
Just upgraded from an LS i3040 with a canopy to a 65hp TYM with a cab and grapple. This particular machine is on our Florida farm and man, what an incredible difference! We still only have an open cab for Vermont, but we’re only there in the best months of the summer so it’s not a crucial. The grapple has been a blast and is very easily interchanged with the FEL. I was very up in the air between the shuttle shift and the hydrostat, but ultimately stuck with the shuttle shift and I’m really happy with my decision. My ONLY complaint about this tractor so far is that it doesn’t have a medium option, just high and low. I preferred to mow with my finish mower in 2nd medium, so I’m going to have to find a new setting for this beast! I own several other Kubota products including an industrial zero turn and a UTV, but I’ve been so disappointed by Agri-Con service in Ocala since their buyout that I refused to buy another Kubota product. The JD is simply not worth the money in that horsepower category IMHO; if you want something 100hp and bigger, JD is the way to go, but for everything else you’re wasting your money on the name if you’re going new. If you’re able to find a good used one, different story entirely but I digress. The TYM ran me in the ballpark of 35K and I sold my 10+ year old LS for 13K cash, so I can’t complain. Comparable model in the JD would’ve been 43K and in the Kubota it was just over 41K. I won’t really break her in until next year’s mowing season, but I’ve already done some tree and brush clearing that I never could have dreamt of doing with the LS, so I’m pretty pleased!
I’m absolutely bonkers over a grapple. Makes cleaning up brush a snap. Hurricane knocked over a bunch of trees? Grapple to the rescue.
Yes, but could you make the turns in a Belmont barn? With a spreader attached?
Or is “Belmont Barn” a regional term peculiar to the east coast?
Yep—I think it’s the same thing. JD calls it a “rotary cutter,” people here call it a shredder. Brush hog, bush hog, mower… 
Wondering that too! Is that a shedrow style barn?
We use a 45hp tractor on our farmette (under 20 acres). We cut and bale hay with it. We move round bales around with it. The FEL has endless jobs. It is used to drag the ring and mow the pasture.
Sort of.
Here’s a very rough layout:
This is a common racehorse barn design, (called a Belmont barn because it’s how the barns are constructed at Belmont Park, among other places) the purpose being to have the covered area on the perimeter to be able to walk and jog horses. I’ve also known gaited horse people to use this design, because they like to work their horses in the aisle.
The stalls are in the middle, with a passageway in the center. The blocks on the short ends are not stalls, those are wash, tack, feed, office and rest rooms. The six thinner lines on the perimeter are the barn doors.
So to pull a tractor and spreader, you have to have a small enough tractor to make the 90 degree turn in a 12 to 14 foot wide aisle.
In the anecdote above, it was originally a racing barn, bought by hunter/jumper/event boarding business. So the very large 80 HP tractor with a cab didn’t work well - it had to be pulled across the short side and parked, and the grooms had to carry or drag muck tubs to the spreader.
They eventually bought a compact tractor for the sole purpose of pulling the manure spreader.
I saw a cute backyard barn that was like a half of one of those. No exterior walls in the aisles. So like a back to back shedrow with covered aisles and then an open space used for cross ties and then feed n tack rooms on the end.
Yup, I’ve seen that too. Nice and open and breezy.
But this one had solid exterior walls.
Well cool! There’s a local H/J barn (now a polo place) built like this. Learn something new every day.
That’s a very interesting design.
The Saddlebred/Morgan barn where i grew up riding was a stable/exercise also. It’s stalls were on either side of a double wide center aisle (like 24ft wide) and at each end was an open ring (like 48x48) Was plenty cozy and warm in the winter.
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. You may also receive promotional emails from The Chronicle of the Horse. You can opt out at any time.
For Customers
Company
Terms of Use
