I wouldn’t have a horse farm without a tractor, and I wouldn’t have a compact tractor.
FWIW I have a 35 hp Kioti 4wd…it has been rock solid work horse over the last ten years on a small 10 acre farm. Kioti is a little cheaper than its (other) orange and green competitors. I may be wrong but I think investment in a tractor (unlike a car) will also hold its value. The suggestion of a used tractor may be risky if your SO or you are not mechanically inclined and SO is already not keen on the idea. I suspect if you get a tractor you will not be able to get SO off it once you get it home.
I have 5 ac, half in pasture. For the last few years I have used a zero turn mower to mow the pastures and to pull a harrow drag in the fields and arena, and to pull a small garden trailer to bring manure out to the dumping pile. Works fine.
BUT some days i really wish I had a small tractor with a blade or FEL.
A used subcompact tractor may do what you need, but it will be a hard compromise between useful loader capacity for the stone / manure task and being good at mowing. Tractors with good loader capacity are very heavy and inappropriate for mowing unless you like to compact and tear up your turf.
A proper commercial mower is very useful but 3 acres shouldn’t take more than a couple hours per week. I mow about 8 and chose to invest in a commercial mower. It’s no fun to buy a mower that’s 6" wider than the gap between trees, so it’s not crazy to pay a professional service to mow for a month and then discuss with them the “best” mower size for your plot. (Plus it gives you time to get the other chores in check before you take on the mowing too). If you’re thinking commercial mower, take care that the hot thing these days is a zero-turn. They are great mowers but the bang/buck is not great, especially if you compare a used walk-behind or out-front riding mower.
A gator won’t help flip the manure pile. It will pull a drag nicely and move a few bales of hay, but so can a tractor.
I definitely recommend 4wd especially for snow or do serious loader work. Remember with a loader the rear wheels will get light with weight in the bucket, so having drive in the front wheels can be almost necessary.
Not sure what “SMALL” means but farm equipment and farm chores are what they are. Unless you don’t mind taking a million little bites with each task, you should consider making space for the appropriate tools.
[QUOTE=Guilherme;8503743]
Sometimes there is no real substitute for size and weight![/QUOTE]
I propose a corollary also
If you can get a cheap Gator I say Go For It! My friend has one and she pulls her Newer Spreader and Arena Drag with it. She has a large indoor arena with a 5 foot drag and she can do her arena in about 5 minutes. Now she is going about 50 MPH dragging it.
If you have trees check to see how much room you have between them. I have a 52" riding mower but I can’t get in between trees mowing so I can only do the middle of my yard. I wish I had bought a smaller riding mower. Then I bought a used walk-behind zero turn thing that was supposedly 36". Maybe the mower is 36" but it won’t fit in between the trees either. Plus it is hard to start. Don’t do that!
I have the same budget you have. What I have found the hard way is that the well maintained low hour tractors on CL sell fast. I have missed out on 3 Kubota’s that had loaders and were garage kept, low hours that were under 10K.
While I much prefer tractors, almost all farms in CA use gators or ATVs to drag arenas so it can definitely be done. MY trainer has had the same ATV since I was in high school… decades ago. Not saying how many decades but more than one.
It’s a Honda, for those wondering. It’s the Johnson 55 outboard of ATVs. It will outlive us all.
Not a farm owner but just wanted to say that I know several on small farms who use ATVs. One rents a tractor from a neighboring property once a year to do any major work going into winter. 3 acres really isn’t that much space to manage.
Gator
My farm is larger, but I love my Gator and get a ton of use out of it. It does pull a small arena harrow and I have used it to mow about five acres of lawn on my property pulling a swisher pull behind mower (which also does a great job). The dumping bed is great for property clean up, hauling water, tools, manure.
The Gator is much easier to pull out and use than our full sized tractor…on a smaller property I would prefer it even more. The main thing it can’t do is loader work, moving hay bales, rock, light grading, snow removal. However, if you would only be considering a small compact tractor with a loader, I think its loader utility would be somewhat limited anyway due to the lack of weight. Even our full sized tractor is limited. You might consider how much work you have that requires loading and hire a guy with a skid steer.
A bonus: we bought our Gator used from Ebay for about $2500 so it totally fits the budget.
[QUOTE=Tom King;8505660]
I wouldn’t have a horse farm without a tractor, and I wouldn’t have a compact tractor.[/QUOTE]
:lol: You guys are such enablers :lol:! I would hardly consider my 3 acres a horse “farm”, but I see where you’re coming from, Tom!
Y’all have talked me into going with a tractor, but it’ll have to wait until fall, too many other things on the to-do list at the moment! In the meantime, enough of you have convinced me that the steal-of-a-deal Gator will help me out with a lot of other chores until I can get the tractor!
Thanks again for all of the advice!
[QUOTE=airineek;8515071]
My farm is larger, but I love my Gator and get a ton of use out of it. It does pull a small arena harrow and I have used it to mow about five acres of lawn on my property pulling a swisher pull behind mower (which also does a great job). The dumping bed is great for property clean up, hauling water, tools, manure.
The Gator is much easier to pull out and use than our full sized tractor…on a smaller property I would prefer it even more. The main thing it can’t do is loader work, moving hay bales, rock, light grading, snow removal. However, if you would only be considering a small compact tractor with a loader, I think its loader utility would be somewhat limited anyway due to the lack of weight. Even our full sized tractor is limited. You might consider how much work you have that requires loading and hire a guy with a skid steer.
A bonus: we bought our Gator used from Ebay for about $2500 so it totally fits the budget.[/QUOTE]
Wait, so I can attach that pull behind mower and use the Gator to cut the grass?!?
[QUOTE=SugarCubes;8515219]
Wait, so I can attach that pull behind mower and use the Gator to cut the grass?!?[/QUOTE]
Yes there are pull behind mowers. Swisher, DR, etc. Absolutely you could do your pasture with a pull behind mower and a gator. The drawback is gasoline for both (not really a big deal, imo). If you only have three flat nice acres, I would just do your pasture with a finish mower (i.e. your riding mower) raised up 4". If your pasture is rough, you can get a tow behind brush cutter. I will tell you my riding mower was not happy towing a drag (the ATV is fine) to break up the poop.
I am in the minority. I have something like 8 acres and no tractor. I’m not saying a tractor isn’t better, I’m just chiming in because you have a tiny acreage and I assume space is at a premium (or is three just what is in pasture)? I hire snow removal–it’s really reasonable to have a neighbor do it. Once or twice a year we rent a skid steer to dig posts, or do the heavy stuff. I do the rest with my ATV. So far it has been much more cost effective for us this way, but I usually only have 3-4 animals. The biggest drawback is feeding small squares, which cost more. A little tractor is not going to move round bales safely, btw. You said it needs to be very small. I, personally, wouldn’t have a lot of use for a small tractor…YMMV.
The hardest thing I do manually is dump manure in the compost bin. I don’t turn it by hand though…omg that would suck. Hence the skid.
I have my eye on a Hustler zero turn. Debating between the Raptor SD or the Fasttrak. I’m pretty impressed with what you get for the price (welded deck, etc.).
If I had more horses and more land I would absolutely want my own tractor (or actually I would probably buy a skid steer, but whatever).
Tractors are SO useful but they are so expensive. We just bought a 4.5 acre farm and I have my two horses at home now. I wanted a small tractor, but the prices are insane, even on used ones. We ended up buying a Kawasaki Mule. It’s 4WD, and we got it with a plow, winch and hitch. It has a tilting bed which is nice for cleaning stalls. It can pull the ring drag and a small spreader, plow snow and do some minor arena leveling, carry hay, drag tree limbs… about the only thing we can’t do is scoop stuff like the manure pile. I figure once a year we’ll rent a skid loader from the Kubota dealer down the road and do that.
Pick up the cheap Gator…ours has been worth its weight in gold. We would like
a tractor but with 4 acres can’t really justify. When we moved here, we got
a Deere riding mower.
The Gator drags my tine harrow just fine, acts as a portable work bench, feed cart sometimes, poop hauler. We bought it used in 1996. It’s a 4x6.
I have 23 acres with an 8 stall barn and indoor/outdoor arenas with 10-13 horses on the property. I have a kubota B series tractor and a kubota ‘gator’ with dump bed. Both are diesel 4-wheel drive.
Fro the tractor I have a front end loader, front mount snow blade, pallet forks, bales spike, 3 point hitch mounted arena groomer, bush hog (rear pto mounted) and a pto small spreader. I wish I had a chain drag and a disk for working on the pasture.
I use the tractor about 1-2 /week on average and use the gator all day every day.
I use the tractor to clear snow, harrow arena, move round bales, mow in summer, turn manure pile, spread manure.
I use the gator to muck stalls, move hay (small squares) and shavings from shed to barn, drive out to feed the pasture horses, pick pasture and paddock into.
It’s hard to say which I would give up if I only had one or the other. Everything I do with the gator I could do without it… I could move the square bales, muck stalls and move shavings with a wheelbarrow or truck. I could not move round bales, turn the compost or mow without the tractor, but could get a small ride on mower to mow instead. It would almost be better since my big mower can’t do around the trees on the driveway so I have to weedwack those. I need the big mower and a small ride-on ideally. I could use the gator to harrow if I used a drag harrow instead. You can hire out snow clearing and mowing, so I could do that if I didn’t have the tractor I guess. The only things would be compost turning, spreading and round bale moving… but I could spread daily with a non-pto spreader behind the gator and stop using round bales.
I have a friend with a ten acre farm with 6 stalls and 7-10 horses and she doesn’t have either. She does have a quad with a dump trailer that she uses for mucking and moving square bales and to drag a harrow. Her compost pile is in the back pasture and never turned or spread, it just decomposes there. She has a farmer drop a big bale beside her fence once a week in the winter, and distributes it by hand, otherwise uses small squares that are stacked in the yard or barn. She has a walk behind mower and a push mower and uses both to mow. The mowing there is a lot of work, she does have someone come over sometimes with a ride on and would like one of those. So a quad with a dump trailer is also as handy as a gator and likely to be had cheaper.
I guess it all depends how to want to horsekeep. You don’t have to compost or use big bales. You can fence as much grazing as possible so you don’t have to mow much. On a property your size I would get a gator with drag harrow, small newer or millcreek spreader and a small ride on mower. You could get all that within your 10k budget. Then when I moved somewhere bigger I would get a tractor or a bigger mower.
