If you’ve recently purchased or are looking to purchase a homestead, you might have visions of leading a simple, pioneering life. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with using manual tools, you’ll have your work cut out for you if you have a large property. Removing brush and tilling fields for planting goes much faster if you use modern machinery. To decide if you need heavy equipment, consider the type of work you want to do.
Your Homesteading Dream
Will you need help from a tractor or bulldozer? That depends on what you’re raising and how many mouths you have to feed.
Keeping It Simple
Assume you’re starting with an overgrown plot covered with trees and thick brush and the only development is a dirt road leading to a single-family home. The property is unfenced. If you just plan on creating a small garden, keeping a few chickens or starting a beekeeping operation, you can probably get away with using manual tools.
It will take time, but you can clear a garden bed by pulling weeds and softening the ground with a hoe. You can build a fenced-in area for chickens in a few hours with a posthole digger and some elbow grease. Chickens won’t travel far even if you let them free-range. As far as coops, you can build your own or order one from a farm supply store.
For many homesteaders, this is as far as they want to go. Your property might be small enough that a tractor is unnecessary or too hard to maneuver through tight spaces. Heavy machinery is expensive — even if you’re just renting it or hiring a contractor to do the work for you, it will likely cost several hundred to thousands of dollars.
Additionally, many homesteaders are drawn to the do-it-yourself lifestyle, preferring to return to their roots and live simply. The people who bought land under the Homestead Act have an estimated 93 million descendants alive today. You might be one of them.
Working the fields or leveling the ground by hand for an old-fashioned barn-raising event builds strength, fortitude and a sense of community in many cases. It can make you all the more appreciative when you finally harvest the fruits of your labor.
Manual labor also lets you lead a greener lifestyle since you won’t be using fuels or emitting pollutants into the air. Loud machinery can disturb wildlife. If you have a small homestead, just want to produce enough food for a few people and have ample time on your hands, you can probably forego the heavy machinery.
Upping the Ante
However, maybe you’ve set your sights on raising dairy cows, in which case you definitely need a fence. Livestock such as goats, sheep and pigs aren’t going to hang around your property like a dog or chickens will and you might start getting calls from the neighbors to come get your horse off their lawn.
While it’s possible to build a fence by hand, the process goes much smoother if you use a tractor to clear the perimeter first, then a mechanized post hole digger to drill holes for the posts. It could take months if you do it by hand. In the meantime, you won’t be able to keep livestock, which means you’ll be missing out on fresh milk, meat or wool that season.
Depending on where you live, you might also need a barn to shelter the animals from inclement weather or predators. Are you prepared to manually clear a site large enough for a barn foundation? That can be a huge undertaking, especially if your property has a lot of boulders or tree stumps on it. It may be physically impossible to move them by hand.
Similarly, if you plan to grow enough crops to feed your family of eight, a small garden isn’t going to cut it. You’ll need a field big enough to produce a vast quantity — and variety, unless your kids are happy to eat squash with every meal — of vegetables. This will involve clearing, tilling, planting and perhaps leveling a field.
You might also want to plant fruit trees to supplement all those greens. Since most nurseries sell saplings rather than seeds, you’ll have to dig deep holes to establish the trees.
Creating fish ponds or stock tanks is also an arduous undertaking without mechanical digging equipment. It’s possible, of course, but it will require either a large team of people or one very dedicated person working on the task for weeks. In contrast, a backhoe loader can get the job done in minutes.
If you have a big job to do, don’t be afraid to get extra help from mechanized farm equipment — your back will thank you. Although it can be expensive to hire a contractor, you might save money by not losing out on several weeks’ worth of crop harvests and animal products.
Machinery to Consider
You won’t need everything on this list, but try to cover all your bases. There’s special machinery to tackle just about any obstacle you might encounter on your homestead.
1. Tractor
The pièce de résistance in any farm equipment lineup, the humble tractor is a mainstay of homesteading for a reason. The body of the tractor itself is little more than an engine. Where the vehicle shines, however, is in its ability to pull various attachments specially designed for different jobs. Some extensions you can link to a tractor include:
- Box blade: This pull-behind attachment is the perfect tool for clearing dirt paths or leveling an area.
- Land plane: It sounds like a dull counterpart to a flying car, but a land plane is a tractor attachment similar to a box blade. It excels at leveling gravel roads, clearing weeds and aerating the soil.
- Front-end loader: As the name suggests, a front-end loader attaches to the front of your tractor, essentially turning the vehicle into a bulldozer. You can use it to scoop up piles of hay or manure.
- Snowblower: Put down the shovel and turn your tractor into a snow-clearing machine with this front-end attachment.
- Mower: Do you have several acres of grass to trim? A riding lawnmower might be too small, but a pull-behind mower gets the job done with ease.
- Pallet forks: While they won’t give your tractor the turn-on-a-dime abilities of a true skid steer, they will allow you to lift heavy pallets and other equipment safely.
- Post hole digger: This is the best tool for the job if you need to bore perfectly round, deep holes in the ground for planting trees or installing a fence.
- Rotary tiller: Forget the horse-drawn plow — this tool is perfect for tilling a large area so you can plant seeds. Rotary tillers exist as tractor attachments and independent machines, though they tend to be smaller than the other heavy machinery on this list.
If there’s one piece of equipment you should strongly consider purchasing, it’s a tractor, simply because there are so many ways to use it. Unlike buying a bulldozer or excavator — which you may only use once in a blue moon — you’ll probably put your tractor to work several times a month. If you can’t afford your own, you might be able to make friends with a neighbor by paying them to rent their tractor.
2. Skid Steer
This heavy-duty compact loader can do more than just lift pallets and other equipment. To plant crops, you can fit it with seeder attachments such as a rotary tiller or S-tine cultivator. There are also rotary broom attachments to clear sidewalks, sweep straw from the barn floor and remove leaves or snow from a large area.
A skid steer can even dig holes, including digging underneath structures. You can change out the tires or treads to navigate varied terrain. Though controlling two halves of a vehicle independently may take some getting used to, it’s not hard to learn to drive a skid steer and its small size makes it easy to maneuver.
3. Brush Cutter
Also called a forestry mulcher, this heavy machine uses a toothed rotary drum to make short work of vegetation while barely disturbing the soil. Afterward, you’ll be left with mulch you can use for gardening. A brush cutter is essential for clearing large swathes of land for site preparation. You can also use it to remove underbrush and invasive shrubs to restore a grassland habitat or clear logs and other fuel sources to prevent wildfires.
A brush cutter can only fell small trees and shrubs, so if you need to cut down a large patch of woods, start with a chainsaw. You’ll also need road access to drive the brush cutter to the site you want to clear.
4. Bulldozer
Characterized by a wide, shovel-shaped blade on the front, a bulldozer allows you to easily remove roots, stumps and small trees from a large area. You can also use it to clear rocks and flatten paths to build roads or foundations.
Different attachments allow the vehicle to perform specialized jobs. If you attach a ripper to the back of the machine, you can loosen hard or impacted soil as you drive. A stumpbuster attachment can split apart tree stumps. A bulldozer is also an excellent choice for leveling a field so you can plant seeds.
5. Combine Harvester
To reap, thresh, gather and winnow crops in one fell swoop, you can’t go wrong with a combine harvester, often simply called a combine. This is a valuable machine to have in your arsenal if you plan to sow large fields of wheat, rye, barley, oats or other grasslike crops.
You’ll need to buy the proper header attachment depending on the specific plants you’re going to grow, so a combine works best in a field planted with only one type of crop. That can make it impractical for use on a small homestead. But a combine harvester could be useful if you intend to plant several acres of crops and want to save time when it comes to harvesting.
6. Backhoe Loader
This machine is sometimes just called a backhoe. It consists of a heavy, tractor-like body with a bucket on the front and backhoe on the rear. The design is derived from a tractor fitted with a rear backhoe attachment and front loader and while you can certainly buy these attachments to transform your tractor into a backhoe loader, you can also use the real thing.
This versatile machine excels at digging, landscaping, demolition, breaking asphalt and transporting materials. You can use it to dig holes for planting trees or sinking pole barn posts. It’s also a good choice for removing stumps and large boulders.
Like a tractor, you can outfit a backhoe with different attachments to tackle various jobs. Some extensions include compactors, couplers, snow plows, hydraulic hammers, rotary cutters, brooms, augers, static rippers and frost buckets.
Buying a backhoe will run you tens of thousands of dollars, so it might make more sense to rent one — if you know how to drive it — or call a professional to get the job done. However, you can probably get away with using your trusty tractor for most farm jobs.
7. Excavator
Equipped with a giant arm on the front, an excavator is a hydraulic machine ideally suited for digging holes, trenches and foundations. You can use it to prepare land for planting seeds, help build fences, clear brush before making a road and dig ponds and watering holes for livestock.
This vehicle allows you to efficiently excavate a trench or remove debris from an area you want to work on. It’s also perfect for clearing paths and trails in overgrown areas. Like most heavy machinery, it has different attachments that let you customize the excavator, so it’s perfectly suited for each job. Buckets, compactors, brooms and couplers are just a few examples of attachments you might need.
Your Homestead, Your Decision
Everyone’s homesteading situation is unique. Maybe you live on rocky, hilly terrain that won’t accommodate a tractor, but chickens are all you want to keep. Perhaps you own several acres in the Illinois heartland and can’t fulfill your goals without a combine harvester.
Evaluate your property and plans when deciding if you need heavy machinery. You may only have to use it once to get your homestead established. Or, maybe your tractor will become as integral to your farm as a good fence, plenty of wide, open space and a sky full of rain.
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