To Tractor or Not To Tractor

How much should you mechanize? Tractor, tiller, or spade? Or oxen and horses?

When I was an urban farmer on six-tenths of an acre, I always wanted to get an ox. I figured I could plow with it, produce calves, and milk it. It would be perfect for a small plot, and provide more high-quality food. But I always knew it could never be, not with city zoning. I went other ways. I mechanized.

There’s always the question of how much to mechanize your gardening or farming. It has to do with scale, cost, your ability, availability, or inclination for labor, your cropping system, and factors specific to your farm or garden, such as soil tilth and drainage. Growing your own food will probably come down to a choice between going space- and machine-intensive or going labor-intensive. If feeding your family is the goal, you always want to make it as easy as possible given your constraints, such as money, time, and space. The easier it is, the more you’ll grow and the more you’ll eat.

Usually, the limiting factor in a discussion of mechanization is tillage. Tillage is probably the most machine- or labor-intensive activity of the whole enterprise. You can use a tractor, a garden tiller or walking tractor, a spade, or can even go no-till (which still requires labor).

You till for several reasons, all of which still have to be addressed in no-till systems. You bury old crop residues, green manures, and other plant material, so that you have a clean seedbed in which to plant. You loosen the soil so that you can get the seed or transplant in the ground and its roots can spread. You control moisture. You kill weeds. Various cropping systems do this in various ways, but mostly they involve moving a lot of dirt.

If space is tight, you can just spade it up. I wouldn’t want to hand dig a large garden, the thought of which makes me want to sit down, and I like hard labor, but a small one is not worth the investment in a tiller. There’s not much you can do with a tiller besides till, so you can’t justify it by spreading the cost over other activities. You can get a snowblower for a BCS tiller, so maybe, but that then depends on how much you have to shovel versus the cost of a snowblower. You can move a lot of snow with a snow scoop, like the Yooper Scooper ( https://www.amazon.com/Kaufmans-Original-Snow-Scoop-Large/dp/B004FG134C?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=ALH4FGW36N568&gQT=1 ). Just saying.

The Yooper Scooper

If you take it up a notch to a bigger garden, then at some point you’ll probably want to get a garden tiller or even a walking tractor. This will save a vast amount of time and labor, though at a financial cost. Even a small tiller will make a lot of difference over spading.

When I was an urban farmer, growing all the vegetables for a family of four, all the eggs and chicken, and some of the fruit, I used a ten horsepower (hp) BCS walking tractor— the upscale version of a garden roto-tiller. I had about 4000 square feet under cultivation, and it managed this easily. This tilled faster, deeper, and wider than your hardware-store variety tiller, with a lot less effort and frustration, and with the advantage of being able to handle a much bigger garden. And even though I now have a tractor-mounted six-foot tiller, I still use the BCS frequently. It’s handy in small spaces or when I don’t have a lot to do. If I’m replanting a bed in the middle of a growing garden, working in the hoop house, or if it’s just not worth it to mount the big tiller on the tractor, I’ll use the BCS. I’ve had it over 35 years, and I still love it.

BCS walking tractor or tiller. I use to till the garden.

When I moved to an actual farm, I got a compact tractor. These small tractors can work with a wide variety of implements. I can do practically any farm operation with my 46-horsepower Kioti. I manage about a 1.2 acre garden with it now. I could handle this acreage with my BCS walking tractor, but the compact Kioti has so many other uses outside the garden that I find it indispensable. It’s also a superior tiller, going deeper and handling more plant residue, as well as being faster. Of course, it’s harder to maneuver, particularly in a hoop house.

Kioti compact tractor. I use for garden work, mowing, snow blowing, moving compost and manure, utility.

A small tractor should have a front loader and a three-point hitch in the rear, and most of them do. The loader bucket allows me to move and turn compost, manure, and occasional materials like gravel or dirt. I can replace the bucket with bale spears for moving hay. You’ll wonder how you ever got by without it. In the winter, I replace it with a 6-foot snowblower, though most tractors aren’t capable of this. A snow scoop won’t make it on my 500’ driveway with 250” of annual snowfall. It would be nearly impossible to farm here without a tractor like this.

The three-point hitch allows me to mount practically any farm implement, raising and lowering it. In addition to the garden tiller, in other farming operations I use moldboard plow, chisel plow, disc, spring tooth cultivator, brush hog mower, flail mower, hay rake, hay baler, grain drill, corn planter, combine, and more. I consider 46-hp PTO (power take-off, for running implements) a good and useful size. You could go a little lower, but below about 30 hp, you’ll limit your possibilities. You’ll want to check the horsepower requirement of any piece of equipment you might want to run before acquiring a tractor. Because I use it a lot in the winter, as well as in hot weather, I have a heated and air-conditioned cab. And you better have AC, because a largely glass cab is a tremendous greenhouse.