ATVs?
 

Has anyone here ever owned/used an ATV in place of a tractor on their homestead? I'm in a position right now where I am having a lot of tree removal done on my land. Ultimately, I plan to move my goat pen about 300 ft further away from my house than they currently are. The destination of their new pen is at the bottom of a couple of fairly steep hills. Additionally, all of the tree removal is going to leave me with about 10 cords of hardwood. I'm young, but I think if I try to move all of that hardwood up the hill with a wheelbarrow I won't survive, so I am considering purchasing an ATV and a trailer to do it with. I'd also be able to use it in the future to bring necessary equipment up and down the hill to the goat pen, and various other gardening tasks. Any thoughts on this? I figure that a tractor would be much better, but the top of the hill is where my leach field is, so I can't run any heavy equipment over it.

When I acquired my property 15 years ago, we got quads right away. I've pulled many a log out of the woods. I have a little 4x8 trailer that I can move stuff with. I've chained two together quads to pull real big logs.

Quads are useful. A tractor with a bucket can do a lot more but I got by with quads for quite a while. I now have a tractor but the quads are usually the first machine to come out of the garage.

My wife and I just bought this last Saturday. We both work so financially it worked out for us. I have a 2006 Silverado but got tired of beating up my everyday driver.

We burn about 2-3chords of wood a winter so I do a lot of wood cutting. I've been wanting something like this for a VERY long time to help out around the house.

The only tractor I need on my 32 acres is the 1950 John Deere MT I use for light brush hogging.

I use an atv with a 4x6 trailer to move my firewood. I cut the firewood to length in place then haul the rounds near my storage to be split. I've kind of learned how much I can load on the trailer without loosing traction on steep grades.(still hauls a pretty good load) I had to replace the drive belt on the atv this year after six years of use. My only regret is not buying something like Vikestand brought home when I bought the atv.

jmo
Doug

We have both. Use the atv's around the farm, but they are also our recreational device as we take them to vaca with. The tractor is irreplaceable when it comes to pulling down our trees. (full grown hedge "thickets" with some locust thrown in). We use the atv's for stuff like dragging fields, spot spraying, checking/moving cattle, fencing, running to the back 80 to cut more trees, ect. While the tractor also brush hogs, digs post holes, pulls trees/logs.

DH thought he needed a tractor when we moved onto the mountain, but we ended up buying a used Polaris Ranger off Craigslist (similar to Vikestand's) and it works great for us. Bought a small trailer (also off CL), Ranger has an electric dump bed and winch, so between all those we get done everything we need to.

There was a time we may have been able to get a lot done strictly by manual labor, but those times are past unfortunately.

A ball peen hammer, and a sledge hammer are two different animals, but one can somewhat do a little of what the other can..... One won't replace the other... they each have their place..

Which would be of more use to you?

I have a Jeep I use to gather firewood, I have a tractor I skid logs with, and I have an ATV I use when I go to cut.... They can all over lap, but I can't mow with the Jeep, and I can't ride the ATV to town...

I feel like the ATV would be more useful to me, mostly because I think the tractor would be overkill. I only own an acre, but I don't think I can move 10 cords by hand up two very steep hills from the back of the acre to the front. It is a very narrow acre (think about 100 feet across) so it goes really deep.

I certainly would not want to break our red clay ground with our ATV, but for hauling firewood, the ATV is a lot easier on the landscape, small trees, etc than a tractor. I initially got my Polaris Sportsman ATV for helping with hunting food plots, but it has proven to be extremely valuable in many other ways. As I am getting older, this will not be a luxury but a necessity for wood hauling. A needed addition to any ATV is a good cart - the John Deere poly cart is what we have - it is tough, light, and well built. See http://www.rungreen.com/10p-poly-car...FRYdaQodzkMAxw

I've hauled a lot of firewood with a ATV.
No question it's hard on them but it's a little easyer on them to pull instead of carry.

An ATV is primarily something for you to ride.

A tractor is primarily a machine for work.

Yes, you can get some work done with an ATV....people clearly do. But a tractor with a front end loader is SO much more machine for work, an ATV doesn't even come close....not even in the ballpark.

Wednesday, I plowed 1/4ac of garden in about an hour, then switched to the 5' wide tiller and tilled up the plowed area. Tilled it again late in the afternoon. Thursday, tilled it again. Then put the hiller toolbar on, and laid off four 125' furrows for potatoes, which we put in the furrows. Put the hiller discs on the bar, and covered the potatoes in about 15 minutes (one trip down each row, not trying to hill just yet).

Today I moved my hog house with the forks of the tractor, then used them to pile brush on a burn pile. Switched to the bucket, picked up rocks, and hauled/spread about 15 tons of gravel on the new drive to the hog lot. Switched back to the forks ( a 30 second operation, quick attach), and hauled a whole pile of 5"x8' fence posts up to the top of one field we're cross fencing for hog pasture. Put the post hole digger on the back, and drill out about 30 12"x 3' deep holes in less than an hour, in hard, rocky soil....the kind you'd have been flying to get a dozen hand dug in a day....and been worn out at that.

I drive my ATV on the forks of my tractor, hoist it 6' in the air, and change the oil, for example.....not the other way around :D

Can you justify a tractor on 1ac ? Probably not. You'd have to figure that out.

But if you DOING much on your place, a decent tractor can be your best friend.

We have 2 Kawasaki Mules (UTV'S) and use them for a lot of things. One is heavier duty with very aggressive tires and we love it for running up and down the hills. We also use it to haul stuff with the trailer we purchased, we have a rough cut mower we use with it, we have a spreader we pull with it. We really do not need a tractor and if we do for some reason we can call a neighbor.

We have one and use it for moving firewood and personal transport around the property. It's great for that.... just used it to tap trees today. 4WD is handy. It'd even make a great mower/brushhog if I needed it with tow-behind attachments, and we have both a dump trailer and toy hauler I use with it.

What it can't do is specifically is tractory things, no 3 point or PTO for serious farm attachments (fortunately I mulch instead of till), no front end loader or backhoe.... and I wouldn't use it to plow a driveway the size of ours.

They don't have near the low end power of a tractor, so I got a big one (750 Kawi Brute Force).

I would never use a backhoe or FEL enough to warrant the cost of a tractor, and ATV's are cheap. I need a plowing solution as my plow guy was like having a mortgage this winter... but a yard truck will handle that once I find one. A yard truck + ATV is a lot cheaper than a decent tractor, with the tradeoffs mentioned above. The big bonus here is the trail system in Maine is massive. I can get to two grocery stores in town on it, legally, and to Canada. I also have a powersports mechanic a mile down the road that does good work cheap.

When you mentioned "steep hills" and alarm went off in my head. Be very careful on steep hills with your ATV or tractor. "Sidehilling", running along the side of a hill, tilted to one side can be pretty dangerous. So can going up or down steep slopes. Keeping your weight (and that of your load) up hill is very important.
A friend is in the hospital now, maybe dieing, because he wrecked his ATV going too fast around the ranch and ran off into a ditch. ATVs are wonderful machines, but they will let you do things you shouldn't do.

GilaDog is right. That how my BIL orphaned his two sons- in front of them.

We have a John Deere Mule purchased from my BIL when him and SIL moved to town. It's been great to move wood from the cutting/splitting area to the boiler and woodshed. We still use the pickup or one of the tractor buckets to move really heavy loads of wood. I especially like it when I work in the bee yard. I can carry boxes and equipment easily. I recently carried a lot of seed bags all over the property reseeding bare areas left by cattle and hogs. The Gator is much easier on wet ground than the pickup.

The Gator is handy but if I could only have one piece of equipment it would be the tractor(s).

Good advice! You can get up 30 or 40 MPH (or faster) in a very short stretch!

A friend of ours from CO had a badly broken ankle once. Our motorcycle owners group went to visit. While there everyone helped to move a big pile of wood from the bottom of a very steep hill to a second level deck of their house. After getting the wood a close as possible by the truck load, the group lined up and passed the wood piece by piece from person to person.
It worked nicely and of course involved plenty of food.

So have a party, invite everyone you know and ask them to bring their gloves!

This is my son on his 70 cc ATV he is very useful he can pick rocks, haul wood, and carry fencing supplies. We have two UTV's, and several tractors but the atv is picked for smaller jobs

My father has an older six wheel Polaris. It's a beast of a machine. He uses it to haul stuff around all the time, including filling the dump bed and/or a small trailer with rocks or firewood, feed, hay, tools (including heavy stuff like a 220 welder) etc. Very useful machine.

He also uses it to park or move full-sized trailers, including the ATV trailer and (empty) a dump trailer. It makes parking the trailers in tight areas a lot easier!

He also has a tractor, though. You can't move dirt or pull heavy trailers with the ATV.

This is similar to my father's machine.

https://www.google.com/search?q=pola...w=1366&bih=634

(His is older, but the design and capabilities are fairly similar

The only thing I don't like about the six wheeler is that it is difficult to steer and requires a lot of upper body oomph. However, as long as it has traction it'll go anywhere you want it to -- I've had it on some very technical trails, occasionally carrying a heavy load, and it'll go anywhere I have the nerve to aim it.

I've seen my father retrieve an elk (in a trailer) plus the elk hunter (sitting in the dump bed) and it did so easily, over some fairly challenging terrain. (I retrieved the hunter's father with a quad, and the guy asked if he should get off and walk at one point. :heh:)

For 1 acre a UTV (Polaris Ranger) side by side would be great. It and attachments should be able to handle everything you can dream up on 1 acre.