OK, so this will be my first tractor, IF I do buy one. Maybe my last one, too, as I turned 73 recently and don't imagine this will be a periodic thing for me to do over my remaining years.
BTW, my apologies if this is posted in the wrong place. I looked for a section for newbie style questions, but didn't find one.
I am located in north Florida. 50 acres of mostly heavily wooded land. Getting to where doing minor clearing manually is no longer as much fun as it used to be. I had a heart attack last year. Wife has diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer last year. Yeah 2022 REALLY sucked. So, things are stacking against us to be doing a lot of (any?) heavy lifting. I don't know how much and for how long I will have my wife's help when I just need an extra pair of hands. And the hands and arms I have just ain't what they used to be, neither. A couple of weeks ago when I wanted to move a concrete bird bath across the yard, that got me to REALLY thinking that something to help me with the lifting would have been nice to have. Something like an engine hoist on wheels, even.
So I believe I need motorized help. Friend of mine has a tractor and has come over several times to help me with some things. He would just shake his head and tell me he doesn't understand why I haven't bought a tractor a long time ago. "Good exercise" I would tell him, doing this all manually. But things have changed. Of course he says he will always be here to help me, but he has his own medical problems and I can't expect to keep leaning on him for tractor help.
Here in north Florida, we have a few seasons where riding an open tractor into the woods might not be a pleasant experience. Yellow fly season, mosquito season, hot and humid season, and the fall ground nesting habits of yellow jackets are always an unpleasant surprise. Oh yeah, and those large spiders forming webs at unexpected places between the trees. Not keen on getting those webs wrapped around my face. All seem to point to having a cab on a tractor so I could keep on tractoring, regardless of those environmental hurtles and unpleasant surprises.
But I have some doubts. I want a smaller tractor, likely one of the less than 25 horsepower models. My plan is to clear AROUND most of the trees, not try to knock them over or dig them up. So small size would help with that. Now, I know air conditioning robs horsepower from any engine it is attached to. How much would the air conditioning in a cab on a 25 horsepower tractor impact the usefulness of the thing? Wouldn't make much sense to have to choose between using the AC or running a flail mower when needed, if the tractor didn't have the power to run both simultaneously, now would it? So is there a MINIMUM horsepower rating for a tractor engine below which having a cab with AC is just pure folly?
And there is the issue of driving through woods with the cab. Are they designed to take some arguments with tree branches and not get damaged excessively? The way I am thinking about it, I WILL have tree branches to contend with. But it is not too bad. Mostly small saplings that I would want to take out anyway. Pine trees tend to put their branches up high around here. I guess I would rather have those branches scraping and slapping at the cab rather than my head and upper body. And I suppose the ROP guard would likely catch many of them anyway, just hopefully not bending them forward and down to knock my hat off. I guess I could take the time with a polesaw to take out many of the lower branches, but that puts me back in the environmental concerns that had me thinking about getting the cab in the first place. Walking through the woods with a pole saw would not be any more fun than driving through the woods at those above mentioned challenging seasons.
Are the doors and windows of these cabs field replaceable repairs? And are they made of actual glass (perhaps impact resistant?) or just some plastic that would get scratched all to hell from the branches?
Just a silly idea wanting to get a small tractor with a cab anyway? Suck it up, buttercup, face the elements and take the scars? Or just sell the place and go live in a condo on the beach and forget about the whole thing?
Yeah, I know. Expecting answers mostly beginning with "Well, it depends......."
