Morning All,
My wife and I have just closed on 135 acres in Nelson County, Virginia. Land is about 60% wooded land at a healthy slope that'll never be much more than select cut timber land with some ATV tracks running through. The remaining 40% is split between existing pretty well maintained bottomland pasture and a good chunk that has been abandoned for about 7 / 10 years. Much of this is at a gradual slope great for grazing and was covered in apple orchards 40 years back.
I clearly need a tractor for tasks like:
- Bushhogging and deadfall clearing on the overgrown pastures
- Post hole digging for restoring fences
- Restoring old timber roads
- Select cutting timber and then moving around the debris to proper disposal / burn sites
- Returning the bottom land to crop cultivation is a future goal bit I'd expect thats 4/6 years out at this
I think I need a tractor between 50 & 75 HP with an upgraded brush cutter, a bucket with toothbar and a rear blade. A lot of my work will be along and in the treelines so I don't want a cab. My ability to go beyond basic preventative maintenance is limited at best. This will be my first tractor so there's a real fear of buying something that's too much machine for me to handle but I've got some great neighbors that have agreed to provide some mentoring.
At this point I think I've pretty much talked myself into a JD 5075e but I'd love feedback from the community regarding size, brand, config, attachments... This is the biggest non- real estate purchase I've ever made and I just feel a little overwhelmed so all thoughts are welcome.
You have about 80 acres of woods and 55 acres of fields/abandoned fields. Anything from a medium sized 35-40 HP compact to a smaller full-sized utility tractor such as a 5075E would work for keeping logging roads cleared and have a loader that can pick up and move brush. How large of a tractor you need mainly depends on what you want to do on those 55 acres that aren't wooded. If all you intend to do is maybe knock it down once per year and don't mind taking a few days to do it, all you really need is the same 5-6' rotary cutter that you'd use to knock down the weeds on the logging roads in the woods and that doesn't take all that much tractor to run, the 35-40 HP compact would do it just fine. If you want to keep the fields knocked down several times per year and want to run a larger cutter such as a batwing to speed it up, you will want to get a utility tractor of probably at least 75 HP. If you want to plant crops, I would recommend a full-sized utility tractor such as one of the 5Es at a minimum as while the compacts
can till up soil and run planting equipment, they are pretty light in weight and will take a whole lot longer to do the work. If you want to make hay, you will also need something at least the size of a 5E to handle a standard square baler, and one with at least 65-75 HP to run an average round baler or any sort of disc mower conditioner.
My family and I reclaimed about 50 acres of fields similar to yours a couple decades ago, they had been left fallow for about 10 years and had trees up to about 3" in diameter growing up in them. We cut down and grubbed out the trees larger than about an inch around, used a 5' Bush Hog (a Razorback, which was their lightest duty one) to cut the <1" saplings, weeds, and brambles, a 4x16 semi-mount plow to plow it up, and then an 11' tandem disc to smooth out the soil before planting with an end wheel drill. Subsequent years we used a 7 shank mounted chisel plow and a 10' mounted field cultivator for tillage before drilling a beans and wheat rotation. Later on we got out of crops and hayed the area with a (sickle) Haybine and a 4x6 round baler as well as putting up some small squares. The rest of the property was 150 acres of woods and we used the tractor and the 5' Bush Hog to maintain the logging roads. We used an open station 80 HP tractor that would be somewhere in between the 5075E and the 5085E to do the work and it was fine for all of that. We wouldn't have wanted a smaller tractor in the fields but wouldn't have wanted a larger tractor or one with a cab in the woods.
The 5075E is a nice tractor, I have one and it is a pretty handy machine. These machines are thousands less expensive for the same power compared to a larger compact such as a Deere 4 series and its competitors. If what I see come on and off the lot at the local Deere dealerships is an indication, 5Es are probably their second largest selling line behind 1 series subcompacts.