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Have you been enjoying our company's blogs, how-tos, and other instructional information? Then we have great news for you! Tractor Tools Direct co-owner and blog writer Marti Livengood Goodwin has published a book compiling much of this information in one place. Haying Independence: The Ultimate Guide to Small-Farm Hay Production provides a step-by-step guide to achieving haying independence on your small farm. Learn how to successfully: Assess your farm’s forage needs. Choose, repair …

Here at Tractor Tools Direct we field quite a few phone calls, chats, and emails asking about different types of mowers and their uses. This blog will discuss the differences between the two types of mowers we carry–drum mowers and flail mowers–and explain why they are not interchangeable. They definitely have very different uses on a small farm. A drum mower is a hay mower. Its purpose is to cut the stem of a crop at its base leaving the cut plant as unscathed and complete as possible. …

Yep. You read that right!Here at Tractor Tools Direct we are constantly reviewing and updating our website. Upon flipping through the pages and pages of blogs we’ve posted and realizing that, over time, so many of them get buried, we’ve organized them here, by topic, in one handy place. Yes! We have nearly 80 informational blog posts covering topics from mowers, rakes, and balers, to field and equipment maintenance, to pine straw baling–and everything in between! So be sure to bookmark this list …

When the Allis Chalmers Roto-Baler was first mass produced in 1947 it brought an innovative alternative to square baling of forage crops. While it produced a good bale it was a complicated machine with 2 sets of compression belts to form the bale. The machine was also quite large. The Ibex TX31 Mini Round Baler produces the same type of round “rolled” bales that have all the same advantages over square bales in a smaller, simpler machine. The TX31 occupies only a small fraction of the space …

Here at Tractor Tools Direct, we have narrowed our hay mower inventory to exclusively drum mowers. Here’s why…..For more than a decade we have provided small-acreage farmers with the hay equipment they need for their farms, and we have learned a thing or two. During this time, we sold both sickle bar mowers and disc mowers. We found the occurrences of operator error to be greater, the cost of parts replacement to be higher, and the incidents of breakage to be more frequent with these two types o …