Neil: Neil from Messick's here today to walk around a New Holland T5.140 with you. We're going to walk around and look at some different parts of this tractor. This is a really interesting machine to me because it is a very "small frame", high horsepower tractor coming at 130 engine horsepower that offers a lot of the same technologies in terms of its transmission options, cab interior controls that you only tend to find up in the biggest and most deluxe of farm tractors.
This is bringing these things down into a class that's not offered by all the manufacturers. I feel that this one is particularly interesting to me personally. We're going to walk around this machine here today and show you some of the things that make it unique at its space.
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Speaker 2: Messick's, a helping hand with your land.
Neil: We're going to start with the information here that we can lean from the side of the hood. It's always helpful to me when we can walk around outside and learn a little bit about the tractor that we're looking at just by understanding the information that's put on the hood. T5 is going to be the family of this chassis size. You'll find a little bit of variation in that, but all T5 tractors basically sit on about the same size frame and 140 is going to be the boosted gross horsepower that this engine can create.
Now, there is going to be scenarios in which the engine can create 140 horsepower, but its actual rated engine horsepower is 130 for this particular model. This family is going to run down into about 110 to 130-horsepower tractors. More or less were rounding a little bit one way or the other. A great tractor in terms of its horsepower on a small farm. With this amount of horsepower, you're running very, very comfortably. Most all of your small hay equipment, great loader, chore tractor, and able to do some light tillage if needed.
Most of the tractors that come into our lot are going to come in with some optional equipment that you see here. You'll notice the portion of the grill guard around the front, this mounting socket here, the singlet point connector here for the hydraulic lines. All of this is related to a front loader. This tractor is what is called loader-ready. When you are ready to equip this tractor with a loader, you very simply set the loader down into the rack, plug it in, and drive away.
This is important for us on the dealership side because when we get into equipping tractors with loaders, particularly big machines like this where we have electronic remotes and complex setups for the routing of all the electronics and the hydraulics that are required for that loader, the installation time to put a loader onto a tractor can grow very, very quickly. We appreciate the times where we can get tractors like this where all of that work is done for us.
Now, if you don't want a loader, don't need a loader, oftentimes, we're going to encourage you to consider these packages anyway because their additive cost is so much less than the potential cost that you could run into on adding a loader down the road or say wanting to trade a tractor in and needing a loader for that next buyer. Having a loader-ready tractor makes it that much easier. Generally, it's money well spent.
If you learn how to look at the back of a tractor, you can very quickly understand so much of the machine and even easily predict what's inside of the cab just by looking at the equipment that's on the back. Starting here in the hitch area, this tractor has a deluxe three-point hitch on the back. If you're going to be hooking up heavy implements, you can slide these arms out to be able to put around the pins on your three-point attachments, making it a lot easier to hook things up without having to inch your tractor front and back, trying to get the arms lined up perfectly.
The drawbar is a nice heavy drawbar. It's going to slide in and out and also left to right giving you some flexibility in how you're going to hook up a drawbar pool to implement. You can see this little lever right here that's going to tell you that this tractor has both thousand RPM PTOs and also a 540E. You can run those selectable options from up in the cab and it's going to move this linkage right here that shifts those gear options to give you the different speeds for your PTO.
The valve stack up here is perhaps one of the most important things to understand on a tractor and a major cost driver. Very simple valve stacks and using inexpensive parts can really drive down the price of a tractor, but conversely, a well-built valve stack with good components and a lot of flexibility is going to make hooking up complex implements to your tractor a lot easier. If you're thinking things like header pickups or you want to move something slow over small distances or being able to run continuous flows for motors on sprayers and that kind of thing, these valve stacks have a huge impact in how well those implements are going to work.
This valve stack is particularly good. It's a more premium valve stack and you can see that CNH is sourcing this through a company called Faster. Good quality stuff and parts for these things are able to be broken down and repaired a lot easier than some others are going to require you to service complete modules. It's a nicer setup to work on. These first two remotes here are traditional mechanical remotes with levers up in the cab. They're still going to have flow control. There's some dials over on the side to be able to dial in your flows, but these are normal mechanical remotes. However, over here in the next outlet is an electronic remote.
If you want to be able to make in-cab adjustments or run things like timers, you have that very, very deluxe remote setup that's found only on the most high-end of ag equipment. Both options, an economical choice for simple cylinders or something that's a lot more deluxe with more features on this tractor. If you look back here behind the tire, you'll notice that this has a suspended cab shock absorber on it. This cab is going to be able to flex independently of the underlying chassis of the tractor, making a significant difference in smoothing out the ride. This is another cost driver in tractors like this. You're going to find this machine in a cheaper configuration with a rigid mount cab, but a more deluxe cab like this really goes a long way to making the ride on these tractors a lot nicer.
If we move up above the valve stack and look at the back of the tractor here, you're going to find three electrical connectors. It's very common to jump into a farm tractor and see all kinds of cables hanging out and pinched into the back window as they go back to the various implements that you have back behind the machine. This is going to hopefully give you some interior routing for those things so that that's not necessary and tidies things up a little bit.
On the right-hand side, we have a connector here for auxiliary power. If you just need some positive and negative DC power coming out to your rear implement, there's an easy place to attach that. This one right here is going to be for road lighting, that's safety lighting and stuff as you drive up and down the road, and up here in the corner is going to be one for ISO bus. If you have ISO-compatible implements, say a baler that can talk ISO, you can plug it right into this connector and be able to pass that ISO monitor control through to a tractor monitor, or optionally another monitor positioned inside the right-hand side of the cab.
We're going to go for a drive. A couple of things to point out here in the cab before we get started. Very, very spacious. I can sit here and nearly extend my arms end to end and my fingertips here just touch the glass. For a short-frame tractor like this, this is a big spacious cab. The side door here extends from end to end with no extra pillars and stuff in between. It makes a really wide-opening cab. In order to close the door, I've got a little knob right here to grab a hold of to pull shut, so I'm not having to reach out and grab a handle out there somewhere.
This tractor has ample space for a buddy seat in it. It's not just a seat that you fit in, but you can sit at it and still have room for your feet and still not totally be sitting on top of your driver. Looking up here through the top of the tractor, you have a sunroof. Now, you might chuckle about the thought of a sunroof in a tractor but it has great purpose with a loader. If you're going to have a front loader on this and dumping something up into a mixer wagon or stacking bales up high, the ability to look up here through the roof and see your load is really nice. You're not having to peer underneath the roof here in order to see what's happening with your loader.
Because of that, you also have a sunshade here to be able to close that off if you've got sun beating in from above and also screens here in the front again to be able to take the sun off of the horizon as you might be driving back and forth. A lot of those nice comfort features that you might expect from your car or your truck, you're going to find here in a tractor. We're about driving the T5.140 dynamic command. The very first thing that I do when jumping into a new tractor is drive it.
Go feel out the transmission, see how it works, see how the gears shift, and try to understand the technology behind it because transmissions in tractors are a huge part of how that machine operates, a huge part driving your satisfaction with that machine, and a major cost driver too. The difference between say, a CVT that you can get in this model and the most basic gear drive variance can be tens, sometimes multiple tens of thousands of dollars. If you're comparing that premium tractor versus the standard tractor, you want to know that you're getting your value out of that transmission.
I always am going to jump into a machine, start driving around, and start to feel it out. For us, we tend to sell mostly power shift transmissions in these smaller tractors. The CVT is going to be a little bit more expensive, a little bit more functional necessarily, but it's a mind shift from running a power shift. This is still going to be a traditional gear drive transmission.
Now, if you're not familiar with power shifts, the word power means that you are shifting under power. As you go through the gears and you click through them, the tractor is never clutching. You're under power the entire time. That's important when you're doing ag applications and you have, say ground-engaging implements. When you make that range change and you aren't under power anymore, you come to a very abrupt stop if you have some implement dragging in the ground. That power shift is an important transmission for those sound engaging implements. You want to know in your PowerShift how many ranges there are. This is a 24-speed PowerShift in three ranges. When you make those range jumps, you are not under power. You want to know that different companies' power shifts have different amounts of ranges in them. There's one tracker out there that's very, very popular that's four gears in four ranges. You'll find it on tons and tons of farms. It's not the nicest machine to drive because you're having to jump through those unpowered points so often. A tractor like this and a three-by-eight is a much better gear configuration. A lot nicer to drive.
When you look down at the display over here and you see that visual representation of your gears and your ranges, you'll notice that there is a little bit of overlap. Right now I'm driving 9.3 miles an hour in the B-range, and when I jump to C, I push a little override button here on the stick and hit my same gear selector. I jump from B-9 to C-3. I didn't go to C-1. It's overlapped a little bit between the ranges and it's going to drop you into the right gear and speed match you a little bit. You notice when I made that range jump, I did jerk back and forth. In tractors that don't have that little bit of overlap, often find you'll find that shift point is a lot harder. It's a lot more jarring.
Right now here I am C-3, and I'm going to go just watch for the jump. C-3 to B-8, I slowed down just a hair. No jerking around, no drama about the whole thing. I went right back the other direction and jumped right back to high again. It's really slick. Very, very easy to drive. Now, I can shift those gears a number of different ways. You could do it here with the buttons on the stick. I find it the most comfortable there. You can also push the stick front or back now, in the CBT transmission, that stick front and back is used for driving the tractor. Here it's going to change ranges, change gears for you. You just tap it and off it goes. Now, when I want to go between forward and reverse, there's some smarts in here too.
I've got a shuttle up here on the dash with my left hand. I could reach forward, pull that front or back in order to change directions, or I could do it over here on the side using the drive stick. As I'm driving forward here currently in C-4, I could do nothing but push the button into reverse. The tracker will automatically shift down for me and then change directions and go the other way. I didn't do a thing. When it did that, it went from C-4 down to C-1 when I ran into reverse, so it actually downshifted for you. I like that you're not going from, say, 24th gear forward to 24th gear in reverse. It's stepping the transmission down while it's making that adjustment.
When you go backwards, you're probably going to want to go slower. That's pretty handy. The other handy thing I like in here, too, is that I can hold the buttons down. Right now I'm in C-1, and I can just hold down the Up Shift button, and now I'm in C-8, just like that. I didn't have to sit there and click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click to go through all the different steps. It's hold the button down, give it a little bit of throttle and the thing speeds right off, and off it goes. Almost behaves a little bit more like a CVT in that way. You're not having to think about every one of those gear changes every time you click the button. You just hold it down, and it goes through all the steps.
Now, it won't make a range change for you. If I want to go from here in C-1 down to range B, I have to make the range selection. The tractor is not going to do that [unintelligible 00:13:45] for me. Now, like I said, what I think is special about this tractor is this pull-down of the big tractor technologies into the smaller machine, and that's reflected largely here in this armrest on the right. There's a lot of functionality in here that we almost did [unintelligible 00:14:00] manual to go through. There's a lot of buttons on here that only function if you have the options that are equipped on this tractor. The easy ones are simple to look at here and figure out.
Things like four-wheel drive, auto diff locks, suspension locks, lockouts, four-wheel drive on it all, throttle recalls, auto PTO that will shut your PTO off, and you're going in reverse, automation of being able to say do headland turns and raising or lowering your 3-point hitch, turning your PTO off. All that can be done over here on this side display, but you will find a thing or two in here that might not work. The buttons might be dead. For example, on this tractor, we don't have a reversing fan, but you'll notice the button for the reversing fan is still here. It just beeps at you and tells you it can't do anything if you try to push it.
The other unique thing in here that I ran into when I first jumped into this tractor is that the remote layout in here for the rear remotes was a little unique and surprising to me. Oftentimes, the little paddles over here on the electronic armrest are going to operate all of your rear remotes, and in this case, one of them is on the paddle over here. The other two are mechanical over here on the side. The hydraulic remote layout here is a mishmash between a very delux tractor and a little bit more standard one. Now, even these mechanical remotes over here on the side, they still have flow controls and hold opens and all the stuff that you get on the electronic remote. Just not quite as nice to operate.
But this will give you one over here that you have a Timer on. If you want to do something like flip the remote and have it run for two seconds while it lifts your header up, you can do that. You did not have to go on and off with the mechanical remote. You do get one here, very deluxe one. You have an electronic stick up here for your loader. You've got all the front hydraulic on this tractor as well. This is what they call loader-ready tractor, so the mount for the loader and the hydraulic for the loader are all already here.
You have two functions for the loader for the boom and the dump, and then a third function as well for some hydraulic outlet for, say, a bail grab or bail squeeze, some grapple out there on the front loader, and that's all here on the remote. These little electronic loader remotes, I love. They're nice, they're smooth to move, and you don't have the slot and the cable action that you have from, say, a traditional load or remote. That's nice to have that tidy little setup here. Over here, my rear right pillar is all the stuff you expect to find in a farm tractor. The hookups over here for several electrical options. If you're going to have monitors, CB radios, you name it, the various electrical connectors can be found over here on the side.
There's also electronics, a data connector up here in the corner. This is used if you're using a precision farming monitor or some ISO bus monitor. You have your plug and your power right here, and you can tuck your monitor up here in the corner so that you don't have to have wires running the whole way down and tucked behind the seat. A lot of times you jump into these tractors, and it's a rat's nest of wires and electronics inside a farm tractor. You may not expect that, but it's pretty common to see. Some thoughtfulness in the placement of these connectors can really tidy up your cab.
On that note, the tractor that I'm driving here now is equipped with a standard simple monitor over here for the transmission and the gear shifts. You can option this series up to have the full Intellivue monitor over here that gives you those tractor functions on the monitor, but also basic precision farming functionality can be had in there as well as [unintelligible 00:17:34] If you want to put your [unintelligible 00:17:36] or something on the back, you can use your tractor monitor as your bail monitor and keep this corner of the cab a lot more tidy by integrating all those functions into the tractor's main display.
When I have the chance to talk to tractor engineers, I always try to drive home that the expectation in a machine like this is that you have near-SUV quality interiors. This is a tractor at the end of the day. It's meant to be out working in the dirt, but when anybody is spending hours upon hours in one of these machines, they have at least some of the basic expectations of the car that they drive, at the very least. This is going to have a comfortable air-right [unintelligible 00:18:17] in it. Because of this armrest, when I bounce, my controls bounce with me. That makes them a lot easier to operate. I have a radio up here in the top with speakers behind me.
The speakers aren't just the cheapest speakers they can throw in here. You can look up here, and they actually have separate tweeters, so they sound good. They're not poor-sounding speakers. The mirrors on the outside here are electronic mirrors. If I need to be able to adjust a mirror in order to see my implement, I don't have to climb out the door or walk around to the other side of my tractor and jump back and forth to try to get that mirror adjusted right, I have a power mirror just like I have in a car, so believe it or not, power mirrors in the tractor. Up here in the right on the top, you have all the buttons to turn on various work lights and stuff around the machine.
Again, carbon copies of these control panels out of the big T7, T8 tractors coming down here into a T5. In summary, T5 140, 140 gross horsepower, 130 engine, 110 net. That's a lot of horsepower for this size tractor. We're pulling down the technologies from the bigger machines to give things like electronic armrests and power shift transmissions in a tractor that is really sized for a small farm. You do not have to buy a big farm tractor in order to get all this stuff on your small acreage. Tractors like this actually are out there, and they make a lot of sense, and you may not have to buy all the machine that you think you might have to in order to get these kinds of features. Pretty cool what New Holland has to offer here.
Shopping for a piece of equipment that we can help. If you got parts of service needs for a machine you've already got, give us a call at Messick'ss or available at 800-222-3373 or [unintelligible 00:19:56] Messick's.com.
