so your telling me you would reccommend using a cut for regular moving of large round bales with a (assumed) novice operator? (Only reason I phrased is that way is that our barn help seems to be on a revolving door policy) Throw in some mud/snow/off camber situations and to me it seems like a poor recipe. Maybe I'm reading to much into this but I don't think it sounds like a good idea. Now, I don't know the exact situation the OP is in, but given the choice between a cut and a utility tractor, I'll take the bigger machine regardless of what the loader specs say. WE also have a ground driven manure spreader that we use for cleaning stalls out in the barn, and the L3400 struggles in mid range to pull it uphill at any sort of speed to spread the manure very well.
All I was driving at was make sure the capability of the tractor covers all of the needs with a little extra. That saafety margin looks great on the dealer's lot but shrinks quite a bit when the work starts.
I don't know what you were driving at, but what you very clearly said was that a SCUT wouldn't handle 1,100lb round bales (true), and that even a CUT would be right on the edge (false).
I'm not suggesting the OP do anything in particular, I was just pointing out that your comment was misleading. There are many CUTs that can handle an 1,100lb round bale with ease. My LS would weigh a bit over 5,000lbs with a hay spear on the FEL, then another 1,350lbs for the counterweight, a bit more for the hydraulic top link, etc, etc, and you're looking at a 6,400-6,500lb machine that can lift over 2,600lbs with the FEL. That means you'd be using the FEL at under 50% of it's capability when handling 1,100lb bales. If that leads to an unsafe situation, it's because someone did something really stupid.
The OP is currently using an old tractor to move the same bales, so whether the operators are skilled or not isn't going to change with a new machine, but it's almost certainly going to be far more capable, and thus safer (good chance the old Ford doesn't have ROPS).
The OP also stated they're on a budget, so that's going to make it hard to buy a newer, reliable, Utility tractor. Sure, it would be great if they were able to buy a really nice, much larger, Utility tractor, but that doesn't sound like it's in the cards. Also, the OP mentioned looking at machines that weigh from 2,000 to 3,000lbs as I recall, so we're already suggesting going up in size to a large CUT, which will increase the costs they're looking at.
Short version, yeah, I'm totally comfortable with the idea of a novice user moving 1,100lb round bales with a larger CUT, like I've described, so long as they get at least a little bit of safe usage advice (the OP did say the land was basically flat, which helps). If they were to do something dumb enough to cause a problem with a larger CUT, it would probably cause a similar problem with a Utility tractor as well.
