Coffee 5-4-13

Hey Smitty,just be thankful your not the guy with only 11 push rods .Keepaeyeonit

dcrane wrote:thats one heck of a mower is that a Walker? I have a hard time keeping my two blades timed right, must be more belts in that things belly then Capt. Morgan himself

I do believe he said it was a John Deere. Walker decks are gear driven and should never be out of time unless you destroy a gear box. They do have shear bolts as well to protect the gear boxes. If you break a shear bolt your blades would most likely be out of time but it probably wont cut grass either.

Freetown fred, the local farm here has a plow, I don’t know how big, maybe 6 bottom more or less, with opposing plows above so that when you get to the end of the row the plow flips and you just plow back the other way. It is like the old back and forth plows on steroids.

Be careful giving your cats booze. If the SPCA finds out they will seize the cats and destroy them, AKA put them to sleep, all in the name of being kind to animals.

Yeah it's a J/D 54". One belt, no timing - simple as can be ... just the way I like things.

Keepaeyeonit wrote:Hey Smitty,just be thankful your not the guy with only 11 push rods .Keepaeyeonit

That was my first thought, too, when I saw it!

Rob R. wrote:

freetown fred wrote:Both those Deere's are really nice--not up to my 8N, but they'll do in a pinch --just gotta keep that floater wheel in the last furrow & by God you're set as far as straight goes--sure wish I had a floater wheel when that Trooper stopped me back in the 60's

You know the slogan..."Nothing runs like a Deere". The only reason more people don't run green equipment is the price tag.

There are a few more reasons then that...

1). John Deere has plenty of power, and can get it to the ground reasonably well, but they do not do so efficiently! You are going to burn through a lot of fuel getting anything done with a John Deere, while the equivalent New Holland tractor really sips fuel, but they tend to be lighter and struggle with traction. Neither is better or worse then the other, it just takes due diligence to select the right implements so that your drawbar pull is right and you are not getting undue wheel slip. In short, you are better of to match a John Deere up with a wider disc harrow lets say, and put that added traction to good use by making a wider swath through the field, because if you are doing so with the same size disc that is ideal for the New Holland, you are going to spend more on fuel to get the same amount of work done. This is NOT about equipment preference, it is about where each manufacturer excels and has challenges and how it relates to modern, efficient farming.

Case in point: our silage chopper, a 450 hp machine that sports a 1/2 million dollar price tag. John Deere's version is a 4wd assist, meaning the rear tires are assisted by hydraulic motors...just enough to keep the wheel from trigging in deep mud. New Holland on the other hand is a true 4 x 4 model that has axles and drive shafts going to the rear wheels. We often pull trucks through the mud so we want real 4 wheel drive and not 4 wheel assist. FOR OUR NEEDS, it is a better machine, but for someone who uses tractors to move the chopped silage the John Deere may be the better machine.

2). You really need the right dealer. Around here, we have one dealer who has many locations which means traveling hours away if we want John Deere parts and do not want to deal with them. They are not very friendly and tend to prefer the smaller, 3-5 acre homesteaders then they do the bigger dairy farms and larger potato farms and really struggle with friendly service. We do have John Deere tractors...many of them...but the dealer relationship is so poor that we just go elsewhere for our tractors.

3). To be competitive in farming, you need to be competitive in your business dealings, and we have seen more than one farmer pay rather high prices because they love Green or love Blue. When we are laying down 1/4 to 1/2 million dollars on a tractor, we like to see what deals we will get. That only works if the dealers do not know which tractor you prefer. If you only have Blue in your equipment shed, the New Holland Dealer knows he does not have to be too price competitive, and the same if you only buy green, but when you have a little of both, you get some great prices.

4). You got to have creative financing. We are dairy farmers so we have really good cash flow as our milk check comes every other week, but we also have a lot of things to spend money on, so we often are savings account poor but always have money to make the payments...it is the down payment that kills us. We buy a lot of equipment from a tractor company that is 5 hours away...simply because he is creative with their financing. They do some shady paper tricks to make us look good as far as our trade ins are concerned and gets the banks to finance such large purchases, things other dealers will not do. Since they are a New Holland Dealer, they have a network across the country to get us the right equipment we need. It is not necessarily better equipment, but since our John Deere dealer does not get so creative, they don't get the sale. As a side note, it is more then just down payments; we have put them to the test, stating what interest rates we are going to pay and see if they can do it. They have surprised us more than once which is why we have been getting New Hollands lately.

In conclusion; yes there are times when John Deere makes the better machine, and their are times when it does not; however...to say the only reason people do not buy John Deere's is due to their price is just silly. You have to have a dealership that is willing to be creative to make the sale; to know enough about the farm to know how we operate and to get financing that matches us; we also need parts and a desire to get them...fast, New England weather is fickle after all. We also need to pull the implements we already have efficiently without spending lots of money on fuel to do it, and we need dealers to know that we are not brand loyal; we need the right tractor, at the right price, with the terms of credit we can live with, at reasonable interest rates because it all goes back to the $1.38 we make on a gallon of milk.

All I know is ... I can afford NEITHER.

Looks like I struck a nerve....in hindsight that was a pretty bad generalization. Obviously local dealer support is important...and in the end that is probably the biggest reason that any particular color is common in a given region. In my area so many farms have gone out of business that the dealers do most of their business with lawn and garden equipment. The few larger farms that remain buy whatever they prefer, and often it is hauled in from out of the area.

You pull the trucks with the self-propelled? I don't think I have ever seen that one...we normally chopped with the trucks along side the 6910 JD and put a "tow" tractor in front of the truck if needed. If it got real bad, the dump trailers went on the tractors. Yes, the mechanical drive on the rear axle of the NH will put more power to the ground. I have also seen guys destroy the rear u-joints mid-season...so there is certainly pros and cons to each design. At the end of the day, I spend years in the shop working on the farm's equipment and at the time JD had a big lead over the competition...so I am probably biased.

One thing is for sure, I sure enjoyed the pre-emissions per-electronics stuff when it came to service. Everyone talks about the fuel economy of the new tractors, but they still burn 18-20 gallons per hour (more for the larger models) and require a big gulp of urea fluid to go with the fuel...am I missing something?

You mentioned self propelled choppers....my favorite was our 2115 NH with a 3406 Cat. It burned a ton of fuel, but it was so simple that it never had any complicated breakdowns. The total cost of ownership for that machine was unmatched by anything else...we bought it used, ran it for years and years with no problems, and it brought a good dollar when it was sold. The new stuff is a joy to operate, but when the dash lights come on you better hope that dealer is ready with the scanner.

Excellent synopsis my friend. I am reminded or an old Downeast saying, "Make it work".

Kevin

Ha...no nerve to hit: I am married to a woman in her 38th week of pregnancy...I am not allowed to have nerves (nor feelings). I just love farming and any day I can get horsepower, drawbar pull and tractive effort in the same sentence, I am in my happy place!

That being said, our local Case Dealer told us that Self-Propelled Choppers "would never work in this area and that he had no intention of getting them, or the parts for them." On their own farm they run (3) pull-behind choppers just to keep up with their own silage needs as he is so stubborn, he refuses to admit that self-propelled choppers not only work well in this area, they work exceedingly well. Even the small farmers have gone to them. Last year he bought one of the kids on the farm here a Toy Tractor of our chopper...I guess...as a way of making amends as we went out and bought a self-propelled chopper 5 hours away.

As for pulling trucks through the mud, oh yes we do that. This is very hilly country with some fields being 12-15 % slopes. It does not sound like much, but add a hurricane and a gale in a weeks time of each other and you get some mud! We use tractors to tow the trucks beside the chopper, but there are times we use the chopper to pull the tractor that is pulling the truck...all through the mud. Those are the least productive days and days when things tend to get expensive. It is not a lot of fun either.

Most of our New Hollands run Cummins in them, and sip fuel and produce enough power most of the time. I have seen on good corn years when the stalks are 14 feet high and the tonnage is approaching 25 tons to the acre, that the 8 row corn head sucks the ever-living life out of the 450 hp engine. There is a steady stream of silage coming out of the spout though despite having a cracking head on it. How that machine can stuff 8 rows of corn through a 7mm space at 4.5 mph is beyond me. That is a lot of poo moving through a small hole!

As for the 9684 New Holland, with that we are preparing corn for planting at 1 gallon per acre, which is nice. It is pulling a Sunflower disc, and while it did burn through $8,000 worth of bearings after a few years, I admit that it was hard years. This is Waldo County; Maine, you cannot no-till this soil.

Our next big purchase will most likely be a self-propelled mower. We are getting by with a 16 foot haybine, but its day is over. With todays high protein, low yield grass, we just got to get over a field faster and with less fuel then towing a 16 footer. We have a merger, but it needs a better hydraulic system in order to work well, and really running a third tractor in the field just is not going to cut it. Neither is knocking down 200 acres of hay a day. I think the boys are talking about a 32 footer, but myself I would like to just bite the bullet and go with a 48 footer. Easier said then done though, when you only get $1.38 or so per gallon for your milk. Funny how it always comes back to that.

What are you using for grease in the equipment? That disc should run many years on a set of bearings.

A few yrs back, I bought 3 Cleveland Flowering Pear tree saplings (about 3' tall) they grow real well, they're real pretty & I look fwd every season for them to blossom NOPE---no pears

freetown fred wrote:I bought 3 Cleveland Flowering Pear tree saplings ......no pears

Well, DUH.... Three isn't a pear!

Damn I got to get off this hill more often!

Nice Freddy!

Yeah mine are flowering up nice. We've had bumper crops of pears for a 6 year span. Last year we got maybe 3 off both trees. Worst year besides our first year here, which produced ZERO of any apples, pears or peaches. All the trees were here when we moved here, and are fairly old, except for one young pear tree. Those are flowering up nice too - bright pink. Looks good, besides my acres of dandelions ...

Rob R. wrote:What are you using for grease in the equipment? That disc should run many years on a set of bearings.

Not sure, probably cheap grease.

I asked the same question as I thought the bearing failure was premature, but was told that it wasn't. I am not sure what the true case is; you would think a $50,000 implement would last awhile, but on the other hand we are not into minimal till here. Our soil is such that it really needs to be churned up, and with so many passes over the field, deep and loose soil, and miles of pounding over rocks and ledge, something has got to give.

I was happy to do some welding on our old disk; just a 8 footer, but after 50 years she still cuts the sod well enough after a tune up.

It is a silly project, but I have a road that splits a sheep pasture on the right, and a big corn field on the left, and I wanted to plant a long row (about 1/4 mile) of sunflowers to border the corn and roadway. As per USDA rules, there is a 30 foot grass strip (we call them "margins" to prevent erosion and I think planting a strip of sunflowers in that margin will look pretty later this summer, so I plowed and disked a strip to get the sunflowers to grow.

I love disking sod, but really love plowing sod with a real plow. One of my most favorite farming tasks!

NS, there is nothing like working machinery hard, seeing the tools do their job, and looking back at the finished product..
I too love plowing and discing.. but don't do much anymore.. My fields are rented, I don't work them anymore.

Greg