4 wheel utility vehicle

Or here on our ridge in the mountains of eastern WA. Our SIL got his power wagon stuck on our logging road. We don't use the ranger to move snow, we use the Kubota with a snow blower.
You'd have to be pretty chea----thrifty to beat my DH. For us now, the utv works.

A utv can go places a truck can't.

And the opposite is true too.

Anyhow, when wife and I go pick up rocks, we got real tired on the loader tractor, and it wasn't totally safe having 2 people on it.

A pickup with doors and heavy I would wear out getting in and out, and it would wreck my field.

The utv is so easy to get on and off, it doesn't wreck my fields.

There is no comparison.

I too thought they were way overpriced.

Don't know how I did rocks and livestock without it now....

In most states you can get a license to operate them for DNR and/or ag use on smaller roads.

Paul

I understand the comments/thoughts on cost benefit analysis made by some posters above. Heck, I was an accountant/CPA during my "paid" working career. But if every decision I made around here was based purely on economic return, I'd be drawing my water from a well rather than pumping it, rendering tallow for candles rather than having electric lights, and beating my clothes on the rocks in the stream down the hill rather than using a washing machine in the utility room. I guess it depends upon whether you look upon money as the goal in life or money as a means of achieving goals/enjoyment.

As it relates to using alternative like tractors/small 4x4 trucks in lieu of ATV's, that might work for some applications. But I can get into some really tight spots with my little John Deere Buck, some a truck could never get into/out of and it would be very tenuous for a tractor. Plus on a warm Spring day, it's just nice to ride on the darn thing.

__________________
"Luck is the residue of design" - Branch Rickey

I have a older JD gator but next time I am looking for a farm vehicle I will seek out a geo tracker or samurai much cheeper and cheeper to work on.

We love our John Deere Gator and tracks for winter were a great decision. We have a tractor too but the Gator gets a lot of use. We take it out on trails a lot as well.

We have a Polaris Ranger (bought used off CL for about a third of it's original cost) and much of our property would be inaccessible without it. Came with scraper blade, electric winch and dump bed....very handy!

__________________
I'm not easy to live with, I know that it's true. You're no picnic either baby...

Don Henley

geo trackers are where it's at. They are small enough to get thru narrow trails, You can get beaters that will outlast any utv for a dime a dozen on craigslist. They are easy to work on. I paid five hundred dollars for a 4 door 97 over a year ago. It didn't have 3rd gear, but I drove it home that way. Now it is a no door, no window, 218,000 miles, beater that I still drag logs with every day. It hasn't left 4wd since I brought it home. I can drag two oak tops at a time or 1 16 ft oak log of decent size, uphill downhill, anywhere. I can do that with a rick of wood packed in the back. I don't cut firewood out in the woods, I drop the tree buck it into about three sections and drag it down out of the woods right up to the splitter, or the sawmill. I use it to feed my animals and water them, too. I can't imagine a more versatile 4 wheeler. I plan to take the air conditioner pump off and put a hydraulic pump in its place to run a rototiller behind it.

http://www.bobcat.com/utility_machines/toolcat/

here is the best and lots of awesome atachments and only starting at 30k

__________________
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Upton Sinclair

I pity the fool
Mr T

You can't drive an ATV on the township roads here, so I have an older small Chevy Truck, 4 wheel drive, it works great and hauls everything I need hauled, it can do everything an ATV can and it only cost me $800!

I started with this in 2001:



All electric. Perfectly silent. The best rig on the whole property.

Eventually I left that farm and at my next farm I got this:



You can see the solar cart that charges it when it is far away from the shop.

I needed to do some heavy duty stuff so I got this:





But then this rig just kept going back to the shop. We had more work to do and while the polaris was in the shop we got a bad boy buggy:





The bad boy buggy is two years old and seems to work much better than the polaris.

All of these are electric vehicles.

__________________
.

[raising chickens] [diatomaceous earth] [permaculture] [rocket mass heater] [lawn care]

.

Not too long ago my DH gifted me with a brand new Kubota 4x4 diesel RTV, a 900 series, with a hydraulic bed. He also had a Rhino liner put in it. Here in our neck of the woods, it's orange or it's green; and I didn't like what I saw in the green. It seemed like dealers here were far more interested in selling big ag equipment, and the little Gators were wimpy things made with a great deal of plastic. Plus, I wanted the durability of diesel. Perhaps JD sells some with more metal and diesel, but they're not around here, and Kubota was ready to go at a very competitive price.

I've used Kawasaki Mules before, and they're really fun. But that barn had three, and most of the time one or two weren't running right and in for repairs. Sometimes the planets collided and all three were down, and that made for really cranky people trying to fetch horses from far reaching places of the farm!

I have no experience with Polaris, and they don't seem to have penetrated the market around here.

TopoftheMountain, I suppose you're totally correct that it's impossible to justify the cost of our RTV on paper. I'm so glad I don't have to do that! We paid cash for it with money we earned, money that's ours to spend, save, or roll up and smoke if we want. I promise you that the contents of my wallet and machine shed will have zero direct effect on what's in yours, so tonight you can rest easy. Life is good, yes?

__________________
‎"The trouble with quotes over the Internet is that you never know if they are genuine." - Abraham Lincoln

I have owned atvs and gators, I went with the gator because our loader is JD and the parts house is about 15 minute drive from the farm, also because I don't want my kids doing 60mph in something that small, I also like the bed capacity, use it at the deer lease too, the rows on the tree farm are too narrow for a big vehicle, and it makes spraying weeds a breeze

Attached Thumbnails

 

It seems to me that most utvs, gas or diesel, are liked by their owners. I do think that what is basically an electric golf cart will not make people who have hills to contend with, happy. f they want to use it with heavy loads they will find that it doesn't have enough power for the working farm. Our neighbors had an electric cart and it would not go up a steep hill with two people in it. Four wheel drive is important in our area, especially if you plan to use it all year round.

I hesitate to chime in here because I'm a total newbie to HT and we aren't even on the farm yet (having plans drawn up for the house now). The reason I am, however, is I'd like to caution anyone from buying a Chinese-made UTV. My husband and in-laws are motorcycle dealers (yes, one of those evil 'dealer-stealers' who realize a staggering net profit of 3%) and they simply will not work on those units. DH says they are so poorly engineered that the mechanics don't want to touch them. I wish I had more constructive info to offer but I don't work in the stores and am not a rider -street or dirt. We do plan to buy one (yes, we have to buy them too) when we move to the farm in about a year and I believe DH said we'd probably get a Polaris. Hope that helps anyone avoid a poor choice based merely on the price tag.

I didn't even think about the Chinese -do they even make a utv? I don't know anyone that has one, but I have heard bad things about them. You are right, when I said people seemed happy with theirs, I was only thinking about the "name brands".

Just to be clear, I am in the rocky mountains and my property has lots of the steep stuff. Even several cliffs.

The golf carts have 2WD and cannot make it up some of our roads - even when dry. And when you try you get a burnt electricity smell. The golf carts are 3 HP. But the polaris and the bad boy buggy are electric AND 4WD AND 30 HP. They buzz up and down the mountains like it is nothing. And they buzz the same routes while skidding a log or pulling a big trailer loaded with batteries.

__________________
.

[raising chickens] [diatomaceous earth] [permaculture] [rocket mass heater] [lawn care]

.

Molly, you'll find Chinese-made UTV's, four-wheelers, go carts, etc. at Tractor Supply-type stores.

I agree, come to my place...I'll winch your destroyed truck out when I'm done. No way in hell is a truck going to cross the creek at my house...no way, no how...in fact, you wont even make it to the creek...too many trees, too steep. My Suzuki Vinson 500 4x4 can go just about anywhere.

Sent from my GT-P3113 using Tapatalk

__________________

Easy if you have areas of the farm that take 20minutes to walk to and would have to make multiple trips per day, or have to put hours on the tractor and switch implements for a cart etc. time is money and you can easy save a few hours a day with something that will last 10+ years?
(8000 to16000$) /(1hr per dayx10 years) That works out to 2-4$ per hour can you find something to do with the saved time and energy that will net you 2-4$ per hour? I can!

Btw i dont own one as i only have 12 acres. But if i had mobility problems or more land i would buy one.

Well we finally got to go 4 x 4 shopping today. Between DH being sick and the temps being between single digits and negative numbers!!! It was to miserable to shop before. Today we had a heat wave it was almost 30 degrees!!!
We went and looked at a couple of different kinds, but most of them were WAY WAY too big for what we wanted, or needed.And very expensive. Then we saw a Gator that had a full cab, which in these temps sounds really good!! But then DH reminded me we would also use it in the summer and that would get pretty HOT. The owner of the francise said they had gotten a used Gator. It was a nice size, really clean cut, and a little less than 100 hours on it. It was a great price, more than 2/3s less than the price of one new. It hd a nice lift back and would hold 3 bales easily and has the hookups to put 2 x 4s to raise the bed to hold about 6 to 8 bales. Yes they are the small horse bales.
So we are going to buy it tomorrow. Ad it to our set of JD equipment!! LOL Now we have a JD lawn mower, and JD tractor and a JD 4 x 4!!!!! Maybe we should paint the barn green and yellow!! LOL

Alice in Virginia

__________________
There is nothing any worse than an angry little old lady, they've had a lifetime to learn all the dirty tricks and people get upset if you hit them!