When you think about farming, what are some visuals that come to mind? Overalls? Maybe a big red barn with a silo and some rolling hills behind? My guess is that one of the first images that comes to mind is a tractor. To be fair, tractors are ubiquitous in conventional agriculture, ranging from a smaller tractor your grandfather may have loved to enormous combines that seem to stretch endlessly in both directions.
Probably few of the tractors in your mind have only two wheels. Perhaps you’ve never seen one like ours. At Good Dirt Farm, a two-wheeled tractor is all we have, and certainly all we need to sustain a business and have a pleasant homestead. Let us explain why.
The Perfect Tool for the Small-Scale
The part of our land that we grow food on is less than one acre, and the total amount of land we actively manage is just under three acres. This is on purpose! Working on such a small scale allows us to boost our quality because every plant is closer to where we work. It also allows us to bring all of our production much closer together, which makes the farm more efficient.
This presents a problem for the conventional tractor. It takes a lot of room to maneuver around, a lot of room to store, and a lot of expertise to maintain.
Our BCS tractor fits our scale like a glove. It can be turned around in less than six feet of space, we can store it in a corner of our garage, and it’s about as easy to maintain as a lawnmower. And the icing on the cake – it’s significantly cheaper than even a tiny conventional tractor. You might think that a cheaper product would be less reliable. We consider our tractor to be one of the most robust, reliable pieces of equipment we own.
Considering all of this, a two wheeled tractor was a no-brainer for the scale of the farm.
Perfect Support for a No or Low-Till System
We believe very strongly in maintaining a healthy, biologically active soil, and in our opinion the best way to maintain this is by disturbing the soil as little as possible.
After initially tilling our production area to break up compacted sod, our plans are to never till those areas again. The two-wheeled tractor’s small footprint and light weight minimize soil compaction. The BCS also has implements like the flail mower that allow us to terminate cover crops without tilling them into the soil.
More Versatile Than a Conventional Tractor
Perhaps the biggest advantage of our BCS tractor is that it can do nearly anything. One side of the tractor is the engine, and the other is a powered take-off (PTO) input that allows one to attach an implement depending on what you need to use the tractor for.
Right now, we have two implements: a rotary plow to break new land for garden beds, and a flail mower for managing those beds (and the pasture that makes up the rest of our farm).
Other implements for our tractor include a wood chipper, compost spreader, snow thrower, hay rake, bull dozer, power harrow, and probably a couple dozen we’ve never even heard of. Having one machine that can be used for many purposes is the dream of both a market gardener and a homesteader.