Buying a tractor

Apart from the big jobs such as clearances and road-building, where I have engaged local ‘wet hire’ construction people, all the other work in the forest has been done using hand tools, occasionally supplemented by renting a small excavator for the weekend.

My plans for terracing were moving forward, and I would clearly need to organise some heavy machinery to sort out the swales and tree-trunks. I also wanted to get to work on levelling some dedicated campsites, and creating a level fire pit and food preparation area. These long-term projects couldn’t really be fitted into a weekend-hire weather-dependent scenario. Finally, I was finding it increasingly difficult to get the car and trailer into the depths of the forest to pick up fallen firewood, having scooped up all the easy stuff over the past few years.

I started looking into the purchase of a small second-hand excavator.

At first, I was pleasantly surprised. There were a number of second-hand small excavators and loaders out there, not too old and bearing price tags in the tens of thousands of dollars. Pursuing this further, I began to get slightly suspicious about some of the photos. Often they had distinctive markings or backgrounds, but were being offered at widely different geographical locations, and some of the pictures appeared to have been scraped from auction sites.

I investigated further, and was surprised to find that there is a whole scam market in 1-tonne heavy machinery. The sellers target small hobby farmers who only want a single machine, and string them along with great deals until the buyer disappears with the money, either delivering an abused or unsuitable machine, or no machine at all.

Some way through this process, I had gravitated from buying a tracked excavator to a wheeled loader. The forest is quite steeply sloped, and I’d found that tracked vehicles can so easily mess up a beautifully graded incline with a single badly-executed turn. A wheeled loader such as a skid-steer or a tractor would be more stable, and with a suitable bucket it can lift tree trunks and grade as well as move material. The only thing that a loader can’t do, is dig trenches… but how many more drainage ditches so I actually need?

I then discovered what seems to be a healthy market in rejuvenated imports from abroad. The specs of these refurbished machines were very impressive and the models were well-known. It is possible that these were legitimate (thinking, for instance, about the healthy industry in reconditioned Nissan Leaf cars from Asia), but when I spoke to the dealer, the sales pressure was high and it began to feel like too good a deal to be true.

Then one day, Bronwyn and I were driving home through the commercial district of our own town, and we spotted a shiny red tractor with a four-in-one loader sitting on the tarmac outside Southern Machinery. We stopped and went in, and came out clutching brochures from the dealer.

Before very much longer, I walked out with a brand-new Kioti tractor with a four-in-one loader.

The benefit of buying new from Southern Machinery has become obvious, with their cheerful and competent on-site after-sales service. I’m so glad that I didn’t take on a second-hand project machine, and can get on with getting things done.

This tractor is a truly amazing piece of machinery. Why didn’t I buy one years ago? I can collect, cut and load a trailer full of firewood in a quarter of the time.

I can move and carry… pretty much anything…

I’m particularly impressed by the bucket grab’s ability to effortlessly pick up and arrange tree-trunks, so that I can sort them and position them for later use.

Then there is the ‘float’ feature, which allows the bucket to drag along under the weight of gravity, perfect for grading the surface of my access tracks.

You can probably tell, I am immensely satisfied with my purchase.