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True synthetic (Amsoil or mobile 1 and maybe a couple others) have several big advantages in certain situations. It doesn't break down easily, it doesn't contain volatile fractions that cook out and/or cause your seals to swell up and wear faster, it doesn't bond to contaminants, and it maintains a film on engine parts longer than organic does, so if your engines been sitting a while it's easier on the bearings and such. On the other hand, if you've got an engine with some hours on it using organic, switching to synthetic does little if any good. You may find that after a year of running synthetic all your seals begin to leak badly, and any blowby or dirt infiltration negates its other benefits to a large extent. The best place to put a little extra money is in good filters. Amsoil makes an excellent filter and mobile 1 filters are also quite good. You'll find any oil stays cleaner longer with either of these filters, if your engine is clean enough that organic breaks down before it gets dirty (which may be tough to tell, may have to try both and see if synthetic looks good longer) then synthetic is probably worthwhile, in a tractor application where there's lots of dirt and maybe not a whole lot of hours between yearly changes there's no point. In my pickup with Amsoil filters and oil I change once a year, usually 10-15K between changes, and it looks the same coming out as it does going in. I could probably just change filters but I can't bring myself to leave oil in my truck more than a year. In my old tractor I run organic.
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