rScotty
Super Member
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2001
- Messages
- 9,550
- Location
- Rural mountains - Colorado
- Tractor
- Kubota M59, JD530, JD310SG. Restoring Yanmar YM165D
Just a couple of thoughts....
Firstly, after being on TBN for a decade or so I've come to realize that most people seem to like what they bought. Dissatisfied or unhappy owners are are greatly outnumbered by the owners who post about how much they like their brand of tractor. To me that says something comforting about the quality across all the brands of tractors available today.
The other thing is how unique that the US & Canadian tractor market is. It's unusual because here we have both large farms and the increasingly popular small rural "home owner retirement farmettes". So we end up with two distinctly different tractor markets. Each brand has responded by making both large Ag tractors and the completely different small compact tractors. Several also make construction machines. Different machines for completely different jobs.
Years ago a friend who spent a lot of time with farmers in Japan explained to me that the Japanese just did not have many big USA style large farms. The common Japanese agricultural plot was only a few acres, and was likely to be uneven land with mud, dikes, and narrow access. So their version of a farm tractor was small, light, 4x4, skinny and powerful because that is what fit their working farms .... not because it was a handy tractor for rural country living in the USA style. They don't have much of that.
So what our new rural population in North America is buying for their compact homeowner tractor comes really close to the Japanese version of a working farm tractor.
That makes me wonder what brand of farm tractor is most popular in Japan today? Knowing that might tell us something about how they view quality.
rScotty
Firstly, after being on TBN for a decade or so I've come to realize that most people seem to like what they bought. Dissatisfied or unhappy owners are are greatly outnumbered by the owners who post about how much they like their brand of tractor. To me that says something comforting about the quality across all the brands of tractors available today.
The other thing is how unique that the US & Canadian tractor market is. It's unusual because here we have both large farms and the increasingly popular small rural "home owner retirement farmettes". So we end up with two distinctly different tractor markets. Each brand has responded by making both large Ag tractors and the completely different small compact tractors. Several also make construction machines. Different machines for completely different jobs.
Years ago a friend who spent a lot of time with farmers in Japan explained to me that the Japanese just did not have many big USA style large farms. The common Japanese agricultural plot was only a few acres, and was likely to be uneven land with mud, dikes, and narrow access. So their version of a farm tractor was small, light, 4x4, skinny and powerful because that is what fit their working farms .... not because it was a handy tractor for rural country living in the USA style. They don't have much of that.
So what our new rural population in North America is buying for their compact homeowner tractor comes really close to the Japanese version of a working farm tractor.
That makes me wonder what brand of farm tractor is most popular in Japan today? Knowing that might tell us something about how they view quality.
rScotty
