Field Test: Heavy-Duty Utility

“The ground was so steep you couldn’t stand up on it,” says Thornton Tweedy about some of the railroad and power line right-of-ways he formerly cut and helped maintain. “You had to be careful, or you could roll a tractor, or worse. You had to know what you were doing and you had to have the right tractor.”

For Tweedy, there was no better machine for such work than Massey Ferguson, when properly configured and equipped. “Massey [tractors] are the best thing built for right-of-ways,” he says. “They hug the ground good, got stability and are compact. They got a lot of power in a little tractor. They’re ahead of all the rest.”

Thornton Tweedy

That experience was one of the reasons Tweedy, who now runs a cattle operation in Arkansas, was asked to demo a new Massey Ferguson® 4708. The tractor is one of the models from the new 4700 Series, which is quite possibly the most rigorously tested machine in AGCO history. Engineers and farmers put the series through its paces in some 36,000 hours of testing in oftentimes brutal conditions, in locales as far-flung as southern Zambia, Brazil, Turkey, China and the desert heat of Arizona.

So, as the new series was about to be rolled out in North America, we asked a few North American farmers for their thoughts on the tractors. Here’s some of what Tweedy had to say:

“I spent one afternoon putting up hay, and that tractor goes just as fast backward as it will forward. That’s nice if you’re loading hay or something. You’re not crawling when you’re backing up. It got the job done.”

“It’s got a comfortable ride too,” says Tweedy, “and it’s got power. I pulled a 10-foot rotary conditioner, no problem.”

Tweedy also used the MF4708 to finish a low-water bridge on some of his new land. He’d hired a bulldozer to do the work, but it and its operator had to leave before the job was finished. “So, I just used that Massey and it worked great. We were dumping riprap in the creek and gravel along the bank, using a loader.

“I tell you, that tractor had plenty of hydraulic power. There ain’t nothing slow about it. It also had plenty of power to the ground and traction on the bank and in the creek.” And like the tractors Tweedy once used maintaining right-of-ways, the MF4708, he says, “was stable. Whether it was carrying bales or that riprap, I had no problem steering or feeling unsteady.

“It’s operator-friendly,” continues Tweedy, “and easy to use. It’s a fine tractor.”

For more, see http://www.myfarmlife.com/advantage/field-test-heavy-duty-utility-tractors/.