The new tractor!

 Just bought a (new to me) tractor, a Kubota M125x.  It's a 2008, and has 300 hours showing; to me that's a brand-new tractor.  As part of the proof the paint hasn't been worn off the front loader... 

It's pretty close in size to the Kubota 9580 we've been using as our farm tractor, but the 9580 is in the shop getting a new clutch installed, and I ran across this one local.  After a bit of haggling we settled on a price that neither of us were thrilled about (I thought it was too much, they thought it was to little) and sealed the deal by adding 3 finished pigs to it.  So for some cash and 3 pigs, the tractor is mine.   It's pretty hard to price tractors.  Even the same year and model will have asking prices that vary by 25%. 

 The front loader is rated to lift 4,000lbs, and there's a forklift that quick-attaches on to the loader so that you can handle pallets easily -- which I'm looking forward to.  The bucket in these pictures is 8' wide and 30" high, which doesn't seem like much...

until you get the scale of it by looking at the picture above.  That's Dan standing in the bucket, loading some 33 gallon garbage cans of chips.  A heaping load in the front loader seems to be about a cubic yard, or maybe a yard and a half, which means moving the chips around just got a lot faster. 

For areas where we want to rebed, but cannot get the tractor in, we'll fill garbage cans with chips as chore buckets, and then move the chips in the can to where they're needed.  In this case the chicken coop needed some new chips.  Toss the cans into the bucket, drive the tractor to the chip pile, fill the cans, load them on the front loader and return to the chicken coop. 

The rear tires are filled with calcium, and that provides extra weight to counterbalance the front loader.  So far I'm pretty happy with the tractor.

Unfortunately for me, a million small birds decided to roost on it last night, and I'm going to have to pressure wash it off.  I really need a garage.