We Got a Tractor!

There are some milestones in our farming journey that can really make you feel like, “we made it” and I think for John, one of those milestones is really having a tractor.

When we lived at our old farm on 1.8 acres of land he would talk about how useful it would be but imagining us storing a HUGE tractor somewhere on our property, outside, and potentially visible to the road. That wasn’t something I was really feeling great about. But then, we moved to 30 acres, and everything changed.

Our new farm has SO many projects that need to be worked on. We have mostly wooded land that once upon a time was all cleared (which we know because the woods are filled with stone walls, most likely marking borders of different fields or beds) we know they aren’t property lines because this piece of property has been part of one single owner for as long as the records go back.

Clearing the 1 acre future flower farm was a BIG under taking. John got himself a new chainsaw and got to work cutting down trees. We got the branches chipped by a friend, and spent $3,000 having stumps ripped out of the ground.

This left behind a mess. The excavator guy did his best to remove most of the rocks and roots but there is a lot that was left behind. This expensive process got us only about half way to a usable farm space. We are going to need to have top soil and compost delivered, and with out a tractor, we would need to either spread and level it by hand (if that is even possible) or pay someone to come over and level it. And then we would need to make a decision every season about whether or not to hire someone to come till up the land. And each future project is going to present a similar set of choices of: do we hire this out? Or do we do an impossible amount of manual labor to try to do it ourselves by hand? And at some point, it just started to make more and more sense, we need a tractor.

So John took after the internet and got to work researching. He spoke to anyone we knew who has a tractor about brands and sizes, facts and features, costs, warranties and insurance .

If you want a full blown tour of the tractor, with all of its features and horse powers, it is probably best if John tells it to you directly. Check out the video introduction of the new tractor here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxLM_6ogm48