I am a gardener and animal person. Fortunately, my husband is a mechanic. Managing a 30-acre farm requires more than a rake and hoe! We realized when we bought our farm that we would need to get a tractor. We hoped that we would be able to get one at an affordable price that would last us many years.
One farmer I met last fall stated that the way to make a farm profitable is to buy used equipment. Indeed, he said, almost everything he had ever purchased had trees growing up through it when he bought it, and he showed me before and after photographs of some of his equipment. This philosophy is sound, so long as you are able to work on the equipment or willing to learn how. New agricultural equipment is very expensive. It is certainly unwise to go into farming deep in debt for equipment!

Before you shop for a tractor, you must know what you will want to do with it. You want to buy a tractor with enough horsepower to do the work needed, but buying more horsepower than you need is costly: it will cost more to fuel, it will have a greater impact on the environment, and it will increase soil compaction. We will need to plant and maintain pasture, dig postholes, stretch fencing, move manure, bale hay, plow snow, and do some fairly light earth moving. After researching the horsepower required to run the implements to perform these tasks, we decided that we needed about 50 horsepower.

We shopped for a tractor all winter, going to every farm auction, and combing through every farm paper. At auctions in our area, any tractors with a three-point hitch sold very high this winter. Tractors listed for sale by owner were also hard to come by this winter, as most were sold the day the farm papers came out. You had to be fast to call, if you wanted to buy one. We saw very few old tractors at dealers' lots, but the few we saw were very high priced, approaching what one might pay for a new tractor. We looked at a great many tractors so that we could learn the market.

You want to be sure the tractor has a wide front end, not a tricycle front end (narrow front). Narrow front tractors are cheap, because they easily roll over on hills. Narrow front tractors have killed many farmers over the years. Roll Over Protection Systems (ROPS) retrofit installations for older tractors are not cheap. You can expect to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $1500 to $2000 or even more for one, so buying a tricycle cheap will not seem like such a good deal if you then add a ROPS for your safety. Extension offices recommend adding ROPS to any older tractor, except for those with wide fronts that are not very tall. Even with the lower wide front tractors, one should still drive with care on hills, and not turn sharply uphill, nor drive too fast on rough ground.

In addition to wanting a tractor with sound mechanicals, you want a tractor with a power take-off (PTO) and 3-point hitch. One hydraulic hook-up is sufficient, although more are nice. Getting a drawbar with the 3-point hitch is good, as those are expensive. Also, if available, you want to get as many weights as possible for the tractor. Weights that fit your tractor are often hard to find, as everyone wants them. Liquid filled tires are an optional means of adding weight, but the fluid in many of these older tractors is corrosive, so look for possible bad wheel rims. And because of the high cost of new tractor tires, you want very solid tires.

We just bought a 1960 Allis Chalmers D-17 that is about 52 horsepower from a private owner. Because we had been in the market for many months, we knew that the price we paid was well below the current market value. As an added plus, it came with a newer heavy-duty 6-foot mower. It is in good mechanical condition. Our next implement purchase will probably be a post-hole digger. We will get a front end-loader for it eventually, as well as a blade and haying equipment. But, as with the tractor, we will take our time and shop carefully for bargains.

Our tractor is gas powered, as are most D-17s that we have seen. In a perfect world, I would have liked to find an affordable diesel tractor instead. Eventually, gasoline will be so expensive that we will be forced to buy another tractor. While one can manufacture bio-diesel from things like waste food fats, it is not presently possible to run a gasoline-powered tractor off of farm-produced fuel. But for the next few years at least, we have a very cheap source of power. Eventually, we will probably be back in the market for a diesel tractor.

Buying agricultural equipment is a necessary investment if you wish to run a farm. While a tractor might not be necessary if you keep enough draft horses or oxen, you will still need some sort of equipment beyond the simplest hand tools to tackle the big jobs. You can obtain your needed equipment and still honor the philosophy of simple living by refusing to be drawn in by the shiny new equipment on the dealers' lots, by refusing to go deep into debt to obtain your equipment, by carefully weighing the cost of the equipment against its benefit to you and your farm, and by weighing the environmental cost of the equipment against its benefits. Like any other monetary transaction, be sure that you are looking at real needs, and not mere wants.

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