Since purchasing the farm there has been one thing kicking my butt that I have just not been able to figure out. The dirt!

I know, it’s only dirt you say. Well, I don’t disagree, and like I tell everyone, you can’t really mess up dirt. Whatever you do wrong, you can just go back and do it again until you get it right. But that leaves out all of the frustration involved in all the wrong attempts. So while it sounds good, it just doesn’t feel good.

The problem you ask? Well, since before I purchased the farm, the arena dirt has been a wavy mess. I had friends come in with skid steers and level it all out, but as soon as I’d have a show it would be all crazy again. The worst part about it is that I knew why. It was my tractor.

You see, a tractor with a plow on the back isn’t really all that good at leveling. When the front end goes up a hill, it will dig deeper behind the tractor, and when it goes over the top of said hill, it will deposit its newly discovered dirt there. So each pass makes the low spot lower and the high spot higher.

There is something called a float control or draft control that some tractors come with that is supposed to help with this problem. The way it works is that you position the attachment at the level you want it using a different handle, and when the tractor begins to dig too much it will pick up the attachment ever so slightly to remove the extra drag. Now, when I go up a hill and the attachment begins to dig deeper, it will actually pick it up. Then at the top of the hill when it would normally be off the ground dumping dirt, it will lower it to drag again.

The image above shows the up and down lever on your left but the outside closest to the fender and the draft control lever on the right or closest to the inside, away from the fender.

To help with learning how to use this control, every manufacturer makes it work a bit differently than every other. In fact, the same manufacturer will change things up on their own units, so that some models do one thing and others something else. Then to help further, they will make sure their dealers have no idea how to use the control and most farmers won’t be using it either. Mainly because no one actually understands what it is supposed to do.

This situation became so frustrating that I almost sold the tractor and the attachment and even considered not having any more barrel races at the arena if I couldn’t get the ground level. We even went by the local John Deere dealer to have them explain how to use it and they utterly failed to do so.

Reading deeper into the manual I discovered that my tractor has a top link draft control, which I had already figured out by looking for anything hydraulic on the lift arms and top link. Only the top link had anything that connected hydraulically as you can see here.

So before we get back to the handles and how they operate, let’s discuss what is going on here. As you can see, there are 3 positions to connect the top link control arm. It has always been connected to the very top hole and based on all of my discussions with the previous owner and others involved in the situation, no one had any clue why, or that there were other options. It has always been there, so it was always left alone.

What happens, is that as the attachment begins to dig into the ground, it puts a twisting force against the tractor via the top link. As that arm pushes, it activates a valve on the bottom of the unit that lifts and lowers the attachment. Per the manual, and per any common sense when looking at the unit, having it at the top, pushes more against the hinge than the valve and therefore causes it to not work properly.

This is the reason that all of my newfound knowledge was still useless and caused me to think my tractor was just broken. Once I moved that arm down to the bottom hole and closer to the valve, the unit immediately started functioning perfectly and the ground in the arena began to level up with each passing moment.

Now, back to those handles. As I mentioned, on my tractor, the outside handle moves the attachment up and down. Or better said, it moves it up and down whenever I have the inside handle pushed all the way to the bottom, or what the manual says is the front. What is happening in this position, is the tractor draft control is being shut off entirely, and the lift just picks it up and puts it down immediately as you’d expect.

The magic starts to happen though when you pull up on that inside handle. The higher you pull, the more sensitive the draft control becomes. In other words, it gets more sensitive and immediate, which is what I’m looking for. I want the arena flat, not hilly after all.

Something else happens though if you pull that inside draft control lever all the way up. The outside lever or height control stops working normally. I also can’t pick the unit all the way up off the ground. The reason is that I told the tractor I want full draft control and want it to handle making sure things stay flat. If I push the outside height adjustment all the down or at least at the lowest level I want the attachment to ever go, I can then use the inside lever to set the exact spot to float. The coolest part is, that you can’t pull too much dirt, because as soon as the tractor starts to bog down from the load, the lift will pick up slightly to remove the load and stop the digging.

Now that I have this set properly, the arena, after only a few drags, has already started to flatten out. Hopefully, I won’t be posting another blog later on stating that it was all junk and it really doesn’t work that well.

For now, though, I’m much happier working in the dirt.