tractor for horse?

[Dylan Keating]

Hi Carl, yeah i’m thinking to maybe borrow my neighbours tractor for the big guys, for now. Ive got an offer for the tractor so i’m mulling it over..

[Dylan Keating]

Be interested to know what Carl and any others used to clear snow? I’m just going through a list in my mind of everything i do with tractor and if there is a horse alternative

[Carl Russell]

There is a recent thread about this also.

I use my crawler now when the snow gets really deep, but for years I usually would just keep the trails open that I wanted to use, by traveling them throughout the winter. I had a few disasterous winters when the deep snow just got so deep that I had to give up on some commercial jobs. Working at home tends to be less complicated.

As I mentioned before, I just made do without the machinery. It’s just one of those trade offs. I would still be doing it that way, or just giving up some areas when snow gets too deep, if I could not have found a cheap way into this current crawler. I sure would not buy a tractor for that purpose.

In the woods I have found ways to fell trees into, or away from, the work area, and use the skidding of them to pack down and open new areas during harvesting. I still need to use these techniques as I do not go stump to stump with the crawler.

As handy as a tractor is, I am much more inclined toward the crawler for road building, erosion control, and pushing, such as turning manure piles. I have still only skidded one log with the thing in three years. I am a firm believer in finding mechanized equipment that actually augments the use of animals rather than equipment that can do the same work.

I try to stay away from expenses that drive me toward using the equipment in place of the horses. I found that the market for used crawlers to be much softer for a usable piece than that of used tractors. Just my own honest appraisal.

Carl

[mitchmaine]

I had two crawler tractors in the woods, and the joke was that you would bolt a coffee can to the cowling, and paint a red spot on the tracks, and everytime the red spot went by, you dropped a dime in the can. that way, you had enough money to replace the pins and bushings when you had to do the undercarriage. I never noticed that there was much gain in out put with the crawler over the horses. except for the end of the day, you just ran it up on a stick of pulp to keep the tracks from freezing down in the ice, switched it off and never gave it another thought til Monday morning.

[Carl Russell]

Mitch, that is no joke. The sad fact is that the dirty secret of the modern mechanical economy is that most people do not account for depreciation in their operating costs.

Tax codes allow us to right off depreciation value, but on the ground operations generally price themselves competitively based almost exclusively on operational expenses, tires, fuel, hoses, repairs.

Credit is another component of this, allowing operators to run machinery into the ground that they never even owned, ending up with no actual capital. They pay in equity on the loan, but that only represents the cost of the machine, not actual value, or capital that is accrued over the life of the machine.

Capitalism is supposed to be the activity of using investment to gain over time through the activity related to the investment. Buying a machine, one would not only pay for the cost of owning it, and the income necessary to live, but would end up not only with a piece of equipment that had an effective life, but the value of the replacement at some point.

Because these are not hard and fast rules, and we all have free will, there is nothing to say that operators have to account for their businesses that way. Therefore, those costs that are required to run the machine over a period of time are all that are necessary to account for. To be competitive they all keep driving each other’s costs downward.

Credit allows them to roll over their equity into a new purchase agreement, and they can continue to make money for the manufacturer, banker, and fuel dealer. Then everyone wonders why average citizens have no capital, and paper handlers have all the cash.

Even operators that get into machinery without credit take advantage of the operational ability, and only account for those necessary costs. If you are competing with folks that are running their machines into the ground, you have little choice but to follow.

Of course we all know folks who have made a name for themselves, and with high quality work and good financial discipline have managed to break that cycle, but in the logging industry those guys are few and far between.

Using horses is a not only a low capital endeavor, but there actually is appreciation of value. While we are making much less income, we are also by the nature of our work defraying some of our potential to devalue our equipment in competitive pricing in the maintenance and enhancement of our working partnership.

On the one hand that puts us at a competitive disadvantage versus machines. Not just on a production basis, but on a dollar for dollar comparison. We just cannot bleed our investment out in the name of competition.

On the other hand, over the long haul it gives us more capital, real capital, that can be reinvested, and re-capitalized throughout many different enterprises.

Just been mulling these things over and needed to download.

Carl

[mitchmaine]

excellent mulling carl. you hit every nail on the head. I try to understand capitalism but all I see is a giant pyramid scheme. based on wage earners spending the lion share of their earnings backinto circulation. I look around and see yard sales every week reselling some of these treasures, and then storage units taking over the landscape housing more of these treasures we couldn’t live without, makes you wonder how much stuff we have and how much more stuff do we need and what will inevitably happen when we just stop buying. I think about it too. it is difficult living on the fringe. no one ever got hurt falling from a forty foot ladder when he was only on the third rung.

[Carl Russell]

You’re right Mitch, that is a pyramid scheme, but it isn’t “capitalism”. It is an Americanized bastardization of a sound concept, with broader common goals of asset growth. It’s a shell game, called capitalism, but it really is just greed.

Sorry Dylan, buy some ponies……you can’t go wrong.

Carl

[JayChase]

As far as removing snow…

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[j_maki]

I use almost the same set up in the picture for removing snow. We have really dry snow here so it works pretty good. If you get heavy wet snow over 12 inches it does,t work quite as well. I have been playing around with a push plow similar in concept to a buck rake but I still got some tinkering to do to make it work efficiently.

As far as the thoughts about capitalism, the model we see to day is what capitalism will always veer towards there is no such thing as true capitalism its a figment of the economists imagination. Greed and power will always excel in a capitalist society as it is the nature of the beast. The only way forward to a just and sustainable future for all citizens of this world is through a socialism and a complete re building of society. We as a society have to realize we are living a rather privilaged lifestyle, and the lifestyle we are living is directly condemning the majority of the worlds population to live in extreme poverty at our expense. It is about time we confront the red scare that has been pushed upon us for the past 100 years and take a long hard look at what capitalism is doing to this world. One doesn’t have to look to long or too deep to see the madness of the system. What is this democracy we live in, I sure don,t see people like me and you on the ballot boxes implementing policies for a peaceful sustanable future instead they are taking our money and financing wars for there financial benefit. All we are doing is voting for which bourgeois we want to be our dictator. We have let these bastard bourgeois dictators tell us what is good for us for far to long, we proletariat know dam well what us good for us and our communities and it is pretty much the complete reverse of what they are telling us is good. So if they say socialism is no damm good then it likely has something pretty good to offer us and our communities.

Just my two cents

And yes sell the tractor and tell the banker you are going to pay him with horse manure which holds real value and not some “worthless” paper with green ink on it that anybody could print.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 7 months ago by j_maki.

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