Real Fixes for Real Farm Equipment

Type “LS tractor recalls” into a search bar and what comes back is mostly noise: owners disagreeing over whether something even counts as a recall, dealers giving three different explanations for the same repair, and no plain statement anywhere of what’s actually on file with federal regulators. None of that confusion is because LS Tractor buried something. It’s because a real service campaign went out…

Type “compact tractor brands to avoid” into Google and you’ll get the same three or four names recycled across a dozen sites, usually with no real reason attached beyond an angry thread from 2019. The more useful question isn’t which badge to avoid — it’s who actually built the machine wearing that badge, and whether what went wrong was the tractor or the dealer standing…

Not every one of your tractor’s PTO symptoms points to a failing clutch. On some machines, a little grinding when you engage it is exactly how the system is designed to sound. The trouble is that the checklist for “normal for this tractor” and “actively destroying itself” overlaps almost completely, and guessing wrong costs you either way — an unnecessary teardown on one end, or…

When a Kioti tractor won’t start, the advice written for a Deere or a Kubota gets you halfway there and then quits working. Kioti routes the whole start circuit through one electronic module bolted to the side of the transmission, under the seat pan. Miss it, and you can spend a weekend chasing switches that are all fine — a recurring theme in our roundup…

When a New Holland tractor won’t start, the part that gets replaced first is rarely the part that failed. Owners work through filters, injection pumps, and batteries over a span of weeks, and the actual fault turns out to be a circuit problem findable in ten minutes with a jumper wire. Blue tractors fail in a few specific, repeatable ways. The Two-Second Dropout Everybody Misdiagnoses…

Kioti skid steer problems are hard to research honestly, because most of what’s written about these machines was produced by people who’ve never stood next to one. The SL750 and TL750 have only been on the market a few years, so the truthful answer to “what goes wrong with these” is shorter than you’d like — and more useful than a padded list of ten…

John Deere tractor problems have always come in two flavors, and for the last decade, which one you got had less to do with what broke than with what year your machine was built. A bad ground on a 4020 is a bad ground — find it, clean it, move on. The same fault on a newer common-rail machine can drop the tractor into a…

Ask ten farmers to name the most reliable tractor brands, and you’ll get ten confident, half-contradicting answers. Here’s the thing nobody says out loud: there’s no real reliability data for farm tractors. Consumer Reports scores riding lawn mowers, not the machine hauling your bush hog. The ranking everybody quotes is a consumer trust survey — a popularity contest John Deere has won seven years running…

The whole tractor transmission fluid vs hydraulic fluid question used to be something you’d sort out once and never think about again. But with fluid prices climbing hard this year, a lot more folks are standing in the farm-store aisle wondering whether the cheaper pail will do the same job — and that’s exactly where the expensive mistakes start. This one covers what actually separates…

When your Kubota tractor won’t start, the first thing working against you isn’t the tractor — it’s the internet. Type the symptom into Google, and you get generic diesel advice from folks who’ve never had an orange machine in the shop, half of it aimed at emissions hardware your tractor doesn’t even have. That’s how a $90 part turns into a $400 afternoon. Here’s what’s…