One farmer I met last fall stated that the way to make a farm profitable is to buy used equipment. Indeed, he said, almost everything he had ever purchased had trees growing up through it when he bought it, and he showed me before and after photographs of some of his equipment. This philosophy is sound, so long as you are able to work on the equipment or willing to learn how. New agricultural equipment is very expensive. It is certainly unwise to go into farming deep in debt for equipment!
Before you shop for a tractor, you must know what you will want to do with it. You want to buy a tractor with enough horsepower to do the work needed, but buying more horsepower than you need is costly: it will cost more to fuel, it will have a greater impact on the environment, and it will increase soil compaction. We will need to plant and maintain pasture, dig postholes, stretch fencing, move manure, bale hay, plow snow, and do some fairly light earth moving. After researching the horsepower required to run the implements to perform these tasks, we decided that we needed about 50 horsepower.
We shopped for a tractor all winter, going to every farm auction, and combing through every farm paper. At auctions in our area, any tractors with a three-point hitch sold very high this winter. Tractors listed for sale by owner were also hard to come by this winter, as most were sold the day the farm papers came out. You had to be fast to call, if you wanted to buy one. We saw very few old tractors at dealers' lots, but the few we saw were very high priced, approaching what one might pay for a new tractor. We looked at a great many tractors so that we could learn the market.
You want to be sure the tractor has a wide front end, not a tricycle front end (narrow front). Narrow front tractors are cheap, because they easily roll over on hills. Narrow front tractors have killed many farmers over the years. Roll Over Protection Systems (ROPS) retrofit installations for older tractors are not cheap. You can expect to pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $1500 to $2000 or even more for one, so buying a tricycle cheap will not seem like such a good deal if you then add a ROPS for your safety. Extension offices recommend adding ROPS to any older tractor, except for those with wide fronts that are not very tall. Even with the lower wide front tractors, one should still drive with care on hills, and not turn sharply uphill, nor drive too fast on rough ground.
