Do I need counterbalance weights

[TripleR]

Yeah, but there's nothing much you can do about gates. You have to go through them, muddy or not. I had a neighbor with loaded tires, and he wore some serious ruts accessing and egressing his field/farm gates. So bad in fact, that I got my4wd ATV and 4wd Jeep stuck on his property more than once. High centered in tractor ruts every time.

//greg//

Situations vary, I don't have a gate that does not have a rock road going through it as we have no livestock. I grew up farming row crop and raising Black Angus cattle and had enough of that back then.

A lot of people if not most in my area have gone to duals in the rear for working with stock and for their utility tractors, so even with them loaded they don't rut very much at all. We also have a wide variety of soils from gumbo to sand and even with a fairly high rock content, so what works one lace may not ten miles away.

We don't put any fluid in the tractors we use on our flatland farm, but they don't have FELs. One of our flatland tractors won't work worth a darned on our hill farms; tried it for a while and gave up. We have had to tailor the tractors for the use and location.

And like I said, we can park them when the weather is bad, which is not an option for most.

 

[LD1]

IMO, less damage will be done with loaded tires and propery ballasted tractor.

At least from my experience, that is the case with out ohio clay soil.

Without a tractor and FEL, without ANY ballast or liquid, the really skinny front tires do 95% of the rutting. And without hardly any weight out back, you just sit their and spin tires and make matters worse.

Loading the rears doesnt increase the PSI of ground contace much at all. The back tires are much larger than the fronts. And with a proper medium-heavy implement out back for counter weight, the F/R split is still close to 50/50. And again, the fronts are what do damage. But with weight over the back, it takes a little off the front and you are less likely to get stuck and just spin tires making a bigger mess of things.

Again, this is just MY opinion based on MY experience and others results may vary.