Upgrading a John Deere LTR180 Garden Tractor

 

Sorry if this is off topic, it's not that far off though!

I manage about 2 acres of garden and a 12 acre field with a John Deere
LTR180 lawn tractor, 17hp, 42" cut with a nice little trailer - I like it,
it's good at what it was designed to do.

But I'd like a flail mower, a rotavator and a blade to flatten the soil
however because my tractor doesn't have a PTO or a 3 point hitch my choice
is very limited.

Before I upgrade to a more expensive machine it occured to me somebody must
have been through this problem before - did you buy bits to upgrade /
customise your small John Deere or think it through, explore lots of avenues
and finally have to go shopping for a new tractor?

If so which did you look at?  I have a nasty suspicion I'm crossing from
tightly priced domestic into expensive industrial but the choice of
attachments on AVANT www.avanttecno.comand and Valpadana www.valpadana.it
look interesting!

Thanks
Richard

 


With your John Deere you're probably going to be stuck with the kind
of trailed tools sold for use with ATVs etc, very limited capabilities
and not that cheap. A modern compact tractor will give you much
greater versatility and better implements. A good dealer will probably
be able to get you a good used machine, but do remember that your
implements will cost you several times more than the tractor itself if
you want to do a wide range of tasks. Having said that I wouldn't want
to go back to running a big garden without compact tractors. The most
useful for general gardening are around 15-25 hp and they would be
capable of doing pretty well anything you need. For a flail you'd
probably need to be near the high end of that range especially if you
wanted it to collect as well - a flail collector is a bit heavy for
the smaller machines.
--
Rod

My real address is rodthegardeneratmyisp