I think a lot depends on your soil conditions. 1st thoought is dealing with the sod/root bound soil, it's going to peel up when you use something with a cutting edge on it, might be best to use some tillage equipment or similar first, break it up, and so you don't waste top soil with the clumps. With a dozer I would strip the top soil, stockpile, do the grade work and replace the topsoil again, problem is that the sod will peel up and you still need to break it up to be able to spread it back out again and grade it off. Strip the top in the fall, stockpile, let it sit all winter, rot all that organic matter, shift it again with the dozer untile it's loose, then spread back out again. Might want to consider some erosion control, silt fence stakes and hay bales etc.
If you have reasonably small cuts and fills, you could do it with that tractor and a box blade, but not while it's in sod. If those cuts and fills are substantial, might be easier to strip the top in the affected areas and import some good clean natural fill material, lot easier to work with and grade than lumpy sod root bound clumps, then let the top soil rot a little like mentioned above.
You could make a mess both with and without a dozer, one of our fields is like that, but the hills are shale, they are not worth fooling with. My food plot was really unlevel, I turned it, disc'd a few times, then took all the sod clumps and put em in the low areas, used the front end loader like a dozer and shaved a little here and there, not perfect but much better, little more work and it will drain off, no more soft areas with trapped water.
I'm not sure how a tiller handles on one of those 860's, if you just want to skim here and there, you have to loosen up the sod layer, and use some care in thinking about what you are doing, strip to much top in one area and nothing good will grow, that is what happens here when you take off the top, it's like the next layer is almost inert.
Sometimes it might be best left alone, lot of work involved, that 860 will get some use that is for sure.
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Today's Featured Article - Listening to Your Tractor - by Curtis Von Fange. Years ago there was a TV show about a talking car. Unless you are from another planet, physically or otherwise, I don’t think our internal combustion buddies will talk and tell us their problems. But, on the other hand, there is a secret language that our mechanical companions readily do speak. It is an interesting form of communication that involves all the senses of the listener. In this series we are going to investigate and learn the basic rudimentary skills of understanding this lingo.
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