Real Fixes for Real Farm Equipment

Figuring out what size bush hog you need for a 40 HP tractor sounds like a five-second lookup, but the number that actually decides it isn’t the one stamped on your tractor’s hood. Getting it wrong means either a cutter that bogs down in anything thicker than pasture grass, or a gearbox that doesn’t survive the first season. The Number on the Hood Isn’t the…

What counts as high hours on a tractor depends far more on the tractor than on the hours. A twenty-year-old row-crop machine with 8,000 hours and a shoebox full of service receipts can be a smarter buy than a five-year-old compact with 900 hours that sat outside all winter and got started twice a month. The meter reading is a starting point for a conversation…

Most skid steer hydraulic problems get misdiagnosed in the first five minutes, because the owner treats the machine like a tractor with a loader bolted on. The Keller brothers built the first one in Rothsay, Minnesota, in 1957 to help a farmer clean turkey manure out of a barn, and the choice they made still trips people up: the hydraulics run everything. Steering, travel, lift,…

A zero-turn mower and a compact tractor share a lot of vocabulary — PTO, hydrostatic, clutch — and almost none of the actual hardware. Treat a zero-turn like a small tractor, and you’ll end up chasing the wrong repair, because nearly everything that goes wrong on these machines comes down to one of two systems, and both work differently than what’s sitting under a tractor’s…

Kioti skid steer repair splits cleanly into two piles: the maintenance and adjustments KIOTI expects owners to handle themselves, and the handful of systems its own manual says to leave to a dealer. That line gets blurry on a lineup this new — the SL750 and TL750 have only been on dealer lots since late 2023, so factory service literature hasn’t filtered into general repair…

A hydraulic fluid substitute has to satisfy three jobs at once on most compact tractors: lubricating the wet brakes, driving the PTO clutch, and running the loader or three-point hitch, all from one shared reservoir. Get the substitute wrong, and it rarely fails right away — it shows up eighteen months later as a chattering brake or a hydrostatic transmission headed for a rebuild. And…

Type “LS tractor recalls” into a search bar and what comes back is mostly noise: owners disagreeing over whether something even counts as a recall, dealers giving three different explanations for the same repair, and no plain statement anywhere of what’s actually on file with federal regulators. None of that confusion is because LS Tractor buried something. It’s because a real service campaign went out…

Type “compact tractor brands to avoid” into Google and you’ll get the same three or four names recycled across a dozen sites, usually with no real reason attached beyond an angry thread from 2019. The more useful question isn’t which badge to avoid — it’s who actually built the machine wearing that badge, and whether what went wrong was the tractor or the dealer standing…

Not every one of your tractor’s PTO symptoms points to a failing clutch. On some machines, a little grinding when you engage it is exactly how the system is designed to sound. The trouble is that the checklist for “normal for this tractor” and “actively destroying itself” overlaps almost completely, and guessing wrong costs you either way — an unnecessary teardown on one end, or…

When a Kioti tractor won’t start, the advice written for a Deere or a Kubota gets you halfway there and then quits working. Kioti routes the whole start circuit through one electronic module bolted to the side of the transmission, under the seat pan. Miss it, and you can spend a weekend chasing switches that are all fine — a recurring theme in our roundup…