joshuabardwell
Elite Member
If you mean to use the tractor to pull stumps, I'd suggest getting a backhoe. Pulling a large stump with a chain is most likely to just make your wheels spin, unless you have some way of cutting the roots and digging out the ball. A backhoe is a slow way of pulling stumps, but given time, you will eventually dig out the root ball. Far better, if you have a lot of trees to take out, to hire a dozer to do the work. A dozer will do in one afternoon what it would take you many, many weekends to do with your tractor.
A belly mower is the ultimate cutting implement on a tractor, but a tractor, especially a 30 HP one, is not an ideal mower for lawns, because of its size and weight (IMO, of course). For fields and pasture, maybe. If you already mean to get a flail mower to rough-cut the pasture, you should at least give it a try on your lawn. If you were planning on getting a rotary cutter for the fields, I wouldn't suggest trying that on your lawn, but if anything is going to be a jack-of-all-trades for both finish and rough-cut mowing, it'll be a flail. If you want a dedicated lawn mower, you may want to consider taking the same money you would put into a belly mower for your tractor and getting a riding mower instead. It all depends on exactly how your lawn is laid out.
For grading, a box blade and/or a grader blade will be great. The box blade has the advantage of being able to move large amounts of soil from one place to another. The grader blade is a bit more versatile, as it may be able to be angled, tilted, etc... in ways that a box blade can't. The FEL is not a spectacular grading implement, although it can be pressed into service. The FEL's main purpose is to carry/move loose material, not to break ground.
When you say, "establish drainage," you may want to look into a middle-buster and/or a "potato plow". They are similar implements, just with a different shaped blade on them. Sometimes you can get one tool with changeable blade to do both jobs. A potato plow is good for digging a narrow ditch, like a drainage ditch.
There are a bunch of different ways to break soil for planting. A plow, followed by a disc is traditional. A tiller is another way to go. A tractor in the 30 HP range will pull up to a 2-bottom plow. I'm not sure what size/gang of disc you can pull. A nice thing about the tiller is that the PTO does all the hard work, and you can get by with a smaller tractor, compared to a plow and a disc where you just need the tractor's weight to create the traction. But a tiller is more expensive and requires more maintenance than a plow and disc. Personally, for a small garden, I would get a tiller. If I was going to do a larger garden or food plot, the tiller would be too slow and I would consider the plow/disc. For seeding a food plot or similar, a cultipacker is a very useful implement, but it's not generally used for general-purpose gardening.
A belly mower is the ultimate cutting implement on a tractor, but a tractor, especially a 30 HP one, is not an ideal mower for lawns, because of its size and weight (IMO, of course). For fields and pasture, maybe. If you already mean to get a flail mower to rough-cut the pasture, you should at least give it a try on your lawn. If you were planning on getting a rotary cutter for the fields, I wouldn't suggest trying that on your lawn, but if anything is going to be a jack-of-all-trades for both finish and rough-cut mowing, it'll be a flail. If you want a dedicated lawn mower, you may want to consider taking the same money you would put into a belly mower for your tractor and getting a riding mower instead. It all depends on exactly how your lawn is laid out.
For grading, a box blade and/or a grader blade will be great. The box blade has the advantage of being able to move large amounts of soil from one place to another. The grader blade is a bit more versatile, as it may be able to be angled, tilted, etc... in ways that a box blade can't. The FEL is not a spectacular grading implement, although it can be pressed into service. The FEL's main purpose is to carry/move loose material, not to break ground.
When you say, "establish drainage," you may want to look into a middle-buster and/or a "potato plow". They are similar implements, just with a different shaped blade on them. Sometimes you can get one tool with changeable blade to do both jobs. A potato plow is good for digging a narrow ditch, like a drainage ditch.
There are a bunch of different ways to break soil for planting. A plow, followed by a disc is traditional. A tiller is another way to go. A tractor in the 30 HP range will pull up to a 2-bottom plow. I'm not sure what size/gang of disc you can pull. A nice thing about the tiller is that the PTO does all the hard work, and you can get by with a smaller tractor, compared to a plow and a disc where you just need the tractor's weight to create the traction. But a tiller is more expensive and requires more maintenance than a plow and disc. Personally, for a small garden, I would get a tiller. If I was going to do a larger garden or food plot, the tiller would be too slow and I would consider the plow/disc. For seeding a food plot or similar, a cultipacker is a very useful implement, but it's not generally used for general-purpose gardening.
