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Steven: While I can agree with some of what say, and can quickly see much of what you do in a livestock operation is much different from our dairy operations of the east. Yes I can agree the 4 range with high, low and reverse on second lever, as seen in larger 56 and 66 series tractors would be a great improvment over the old 5 and 2 in tractors like 560 and 656. I can also feel for those guys buying old payloaders. The thing you have to remember with those is many of them have had 3000 to 4000 hours per year put on them. They are junk when you get them. Here many of those dairy farms use confined feeding year around. We have guys buying new 70 hp 4x4 tractors with loaders that never leave the barn yard. Quite a waste today buying a 3 point and live pto you never use. Most of the stored feed is silage. When I bought my Case 1737 Uniloaders in 1972 and 1975, these loaders averaged 3 hours each per day on their meters. Most of that work was done in areas you couldn't even get a 1066. Round bales to me were just way of handling feed in excess of what my silos would hold and as well hay that got too dry for haylage. Most years that was only 300-500 bales running around 1200 lbs each. I could pile those bales 3 high quite easily I have also piled 1800 lb bales that high with an added weight on back of skidsteer. The main reason I cut back on size of bales had nothing to do with safety or ability of loader but rather my round bales were all stored on second story of an old dairy barn and skidsteer kept breaking the floor beteen the 16" center floor joists. Contrary to what you are saying there are skid loaders out there today that will play with those 1800 lbs bales and indeed will make a 1066 look quite bad even when it comes to pileing the bales. My skid loaders were not large by todays standards. I once had local cemetary committee come to me. They wanted to put from 6" to a foot of fill in cemetary, without moving stones. They wanted me to leave a ridge of fill along the rows of headstones, they could use later for placing under stones as they raised them. The stones were all in rows about 7 to 8 foot centers. They didn't want to use too much of church grounds for dumping fill, so it would have to be trucked as we used it. They advised they would be using single axle dump trucks hauling about 10 ton to load. They had to haul material 2 miles. They asked how many trucks they would need I said lets go with 3 trucks and a Cat 950 to load the material. The contractor who owned the Cat loader just laughed and told them all they needed to haul material was a couple of Farmall Hs with trailers and a 3rd one to load. Due to some unforseen problems I was 1 hour late getting there at 10:30 am. The old guy in charge had 12 loads in church yard. Man was he upset with me. I went to work and at 11:45 am I was waiting for material. I turned to Art the old guy in charge, I said," when you go home to lunch call Cecil (contractor) tell him we need another Cat loader and 3 more dump trucks". Strangely enough at 1:15 Cecil drove in. I was there exactly 6 hours and placed 72 truck loads of fill in their cemetary. I had a dirt bucket with teeth. When done Art said to me," You didn't even chip or bump a headstone." I said Art." I must confess I did take a chip out of Carson K's stone." Art replied, "He wont mind, he had advocated we do this job for years." My point is Steven, when you remove the cost of a 3 point hitch and live pto from a loader vehicle there is a substancial saving In the 1970s and I doubt this has changed we were buying those skidsteers for about half the cost of a 60-70 hp tractor equiped with a loader. They were machines we used every day 365 days of the year. Most farmers were putting twice the hours on them, as they were on their most productive tractor, Mine where well over 10,000 hours at 8 years of age. I did put a 1,000 hours per year on a few tractors, but a lot of those hours came from custom work off the farm. The skid loaders rarely left the farm, as they were never more than 3-4 hours from their next use. One item I have learned since coming to YT forums is how little some of these tractors are used. I always thought you guys on the big plain burned these tractors out in about 10 years. In my home turf most of the 1066s have 20,000 hours on them by now. Yet I go to the YT photo adds and see 130 hp tractors looking quite like new and with 4,000 to 7,000 hours on them. Someone must have been damn well off buying tractors like that and doing little more than nothing with them. Don't talk to me about what you can or can't afford.
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