Neil from Messick's here to take you around this very cool tractor. This is a New Holland T5.120 with an Electro Command transmission. This is a remarkable machine. There's a lot of cool stuff going on in here. A lot of things for me to show you, unique features in this tractor. You would not believe how advanced some of these machines can be. You think you've got some fancy SUV to drive around in. You'd be surprised how much can be found in a tractor as well. Come along with me here today. We're going to check out this T5.
When you think farming tractors, a lot of times people go into their head right to a 300-horsepower machine that you see pulling a big disc out in a field. Here in central Pennsylvania, that's not a majority of the tractors that are found out on our farms. Around here, we have a proliferation of what would be considered low-acreage farms, say, 200 to 500 acres or so. While many of those farms are going to have a use for a big tractor, oftentimes they have many more uses for midsize tractors.
In terms of sheer numbers, midsize utility tractors are a much larger volume segment for us than big high-horsepower machines that go to your head when you think about big commercial farming. This size machine can go into a lot of different applications, and for that reason, you end up with a lot of different options and a lot of different transmission choices. There's four different tiers here as you work your way up of how complex your transmission can be.
The most very basic is called a Dual Command, and that's a pretty basic clutch-and-gears type transmission. You've got a hydraulic shuttle, but you're clutching between each one of your gears. The next step up is this tractor, the Electro Command. This is a 4x4 tractor, so it gives me 16 gears in four different ranges. My four is all done in a power shift. There's no clutching in order to change those gears. In the other four multiplier there- pass the FedEx truck here -is a clutched range change that's done when you're not under power during that range change.
Now, that's not a newfangled transmission per se. That type of transmission has been very popular for a number of years with many different manufacturers. What I find highly impressive about it, though, in this tractor is the way that it's done. The controls here are just really nice to operate. I'll spend more time explaining those to you later. Our next notch up here, that transmission, remember we were a Dual Command and now we're an Electro Command.
The next one up is called a Dynamic Command. I did a video on that transmission about a year, year and a half ago. It's a power shift just like this, but it's a full power shift that has a lot of overlap in the gears. Using some very intelligent computers, that thing can jump gears and speed match and do all kinds of stuff that makes it really, really nice to drive. It gives you a lot of the benefits of CVT without the same level of computerization and complexity that sometimes is found in those transmissions.
Then your most deluxe version is going to be Auto Command, a CVT transmission. Now, for us in this size tractor, that's pretty uncommon. It gets to be a little pricey for the price point that this machine is, but even the most deluxe transmission option that's usually found in those big field tractors can come the entire way down into a T5. This tractor, the Electro Command, now I said before, this is a four-gear power shift with a 2x2 range selector attached to it.
As I'm driving along here, I can put my tractor into forward without touching the clutch, give it a little bit of revs, and then select my gears up and down in order to go faster or slower. Those four gears can be changed without clutching. The tractor is under power the entire time. Now, there's actually three different places in this tractor that I can choose to change that gear. Up here on the range selector, I've got buttons to bump it up and down. Over here on the side console, I've got a place to bump it up and down with my thumbs or on my loader stick. We'll spend some time on this loader stick later. It is really cool, but I can change the gears of my tractor without ever taking my hand off the loader stick. That is nice.
Once you're out of those four powershift gears and you want to go a little bit faster, you need to make a range change. There's two different places here in order to make that range change. I've got a big mechanical lever over here on the right-hand side, or I have a declutch button here on my stick that allows me to change my up and down buttons from operating my gears over to operating my range. Right now, my mechanical is over in my high range and I want to jump up to high high to go as fast as possible.
I hit a little declutch button here in the center of my loader stick, tap up, and I've now shifted into high-high and I'm going even faster. You notice when that happened, the tractor didn't buck back and forth. It did it really smoothly. I didn't have to reach out here and grab levers that were far away. The ergonomic aspect of all of this and the mechanical shift that happens there is very, very refined. A lot more refined than you would expect to find in a mid-range tractor.
Here's our next killer, Electro Command feature. I am going to shift here into 16th gear the whole way up at the top. We're going to do a little roading simulation for you. In some of these power shift transmissions with a lot of gears, sometimes you're forced to sequentially go through every one when you want to slow down. If I'm trucking along here currently at 24 miles an hour and I'm rolling up to a stop sign, I depress my clutch pedal, I come to a stop, the tractor automatically is going to go from 16th gear and slowly step the entire way down to 9th.
It made a range change in there. It actually stepped over the range change there between 12th and 13th gear to put me down to 9th. In 9th gear, I could very simply let my clutch out and pull right back out again. Remember, when we're roading here, you've got field gears here that are really slow so you can easily, say, pull out from a stop sign in 9th gear and then I can jump right through my gears again to get back up to speed. I think that's cool. When you depress the clutch pedal, you're dropping eight gears and jumping a range without the operator doing anything. It's simply the tractor recognizing that, "Hey, he's stopped. Let's do something smart."
Now, I've mentioned the loader stick in this tractor a time or two now. That loader stick is really cool. It's integrated into the armrest here on the seat. When you get into large field tractors, more and more of the controls are moved over onto intelligent armrests. That's a little unusual when you get down into smaller machines like this. It's pretty expensive to do and there's not that much room here in order to pull it off. This one gets you halfway there and gets the most important feature over onto the armrest and that's the loader stick.
We're going to put loaders on a vast majority of tractors in this horsepower class because they're often used for moving materials, handling hay bales, that kind of stuff. They're very frequently loader tractors. This is an electronic stick here that comes through from New Holland. It's not an aftermarket stick. There's companies like Alo that build a lot of the loaders for these tractors. Alo has electronic sticks, but this is not one of theirs. This is actually a New Holland design stick and it's integrated into some of the other features here on the dash that I'm going to show you.
There's a couple of things that I really like about this stick. One is the shifting that we've been talking about here. I have my buttons on the front here and my declutch button to be able to change gears. That's cool. If you have a third function on the front, you have buttons on the side of the stick to be able to operate that grapple or bale squeeze or whatever may be on there, and the stick is electronic. It's electric over hydraulic. It sits here on the armrest with a very short, pleasing, and smooth flow as you operate it back and forth.
Super, super smooth. It has an awesome feel to it. The cool thing about having it here on the armrest is that it moves with the operator. If you're traveling across the field carrying a bale and your seat is bouncing up and down as you go, your loader stick is moving with your seat, so your arm is not sitting here inadvertently moving your loader stick back and forth as you're bouncing around. That's typical when you're reaching off and you're grabbing a control that's not part of your seat. I'm a fan of that. Again, with the kind of work that these tractors do, this stick is a really nice addition.
This electric over hydraulic thing brings some other benefits. By using this little dial down here on the control rest, you're actually able to go in and choose the first or second valve segment and dial your flows up and down. If you want to change how fast your bucket operates as it goes up or down or change the speed of your curl, you're able to dial that in here electronically by using this little button and making a couple of selections up on the dash. That's typical on a lot of high-end tractors with electronic rear remotes. It's neat to be able to see this implemented in the loader. That's not something that I often have seen.
The electronic dash on these tractors sometimes can be a little intimidating at first glance. I frankly was a little confused by this one when I first started digging around, but I quickly found what I was looking for when I realized that many parts of this screen don't change. There's some configurable areas in here, some menus that you could drill into, but there's also some things that are just constantly in one spot. I mentioned before being able to configure my loader valve.
By clicking this button down here, I can go in here and choose my first valve segment, turn my dial over here to my second valve segment, and make changes using this small square here on the screen. I also have some buttons down on the side of the steering column here that I can go through and toggle this over to showing things like battery voltage, hours, and some other options. That portion of the screen changes, but you're going to find that many of the things like my gear selector, my hour meter toggles over to PTO RPMs, my miles per hour is always there at the bottom.
This one is not as bad as some that you see. You don't have a ton of space on there, so they've got to cram that information in, but I was able to pretty quickly pick up on its function. Over here on my right-hand side is what's called the command arc. It's the way the buttons are laid out here over on the right-hand fender in an arc in order to make them easily laid out. Now, you're going to be able to pick up pretty quickly here on what many of these things do. Again, there's a lot going on, but once you start understanding the basic functions of them, it's not as intimidating as what it looks like.
I've got three rear remotes. Two is usually going to be standard on a tractor like this. The third is going to be optional. Up here in front of me is the selector for that mechanical range. Back here right beside the armrest is my throttle control and also my three-point hitch height control. Now, three-point hitch height also has a toggle beside it here to go between full up and full down. As you're going back and forth across your headlands, you just tap the button up and down and the tractor will raise and lower the hitch rather than you having to make an adjustment to a long throw lever.
There's also some dials back here on the right-hand side that are going to take care of things like three-point maximum height, three-point hitch speed, and your draft control. Those are all done with knobs here back to the back, clustered together. There's also a cluster of switches here that are going to take care of things like your auto engagement or fixed engagement of your four-wheel drive, your diff locks, things related to engine RPM, throttle recalls, and that kind of stuff are all done on these switches.
The big yellow knob is going to be your PTO. Take care of the one in the rear. This can actually be fitted with a front PTO as well if that's an option that you would use. That second knob is another right behind the existing one right here. The yellow-yellow button with a check mark by it allows you to operate the PTO if you are not in the tractor. If you want to, say, park the machine and have it run a silage blower, you can pull the parking brake, turn the PTO on, hit that button, and get out of the tractor, and allow the PTO to continue to run without the seat switch cutting it off because you've gotten out of the machine. That's just a safety there to allow that thing to run.
I mentioned before that some of these tractors can start to rival your SUV. Even this mid-range utility tractor has got a lot of things in it that are very comfortable. I'm sitting on a nice air-ride seat with a lot of adjustability for forward and back and up and down and twisting if I'm looking behind me operating an implement. You'll notice up here I've got a radio up here just above my head with speakers right behind me. I've got a sunroof right up here above my camera here. That opens out of the way.
That might seem silly in a tractor, but if you've got a loader on, it allows you to look up and see your load, be able to see where your loader is at rather than the roof line cutting off your visibility. I've got room in here for a buddy seat. There's a second fold-up seat over here by the door that can be lowered down so that you can have a passenger and no shortage of cup holders to my left, to my right, above, below me. There are storage pockets all over the inside of this tractor because you're going to be out here for a long time. You put in an eight-hour day out in the seat, you're going to need to have some refreshments with you.
Now, if you're not used to farm equipment, you might look at this metal mounting plate over here on the right-hand side and be confused. There's clearly something here that looks like it's missing something, that something else should be bolted on. When you're using a tractor like this, most of the time you're using another implement that's usually going to have another screen or display or controller with it that might operate additional functions.
Say you're running a round baler, you're going to have a monitor up here that tells you what your baler is doing. You're probably monitoring moistures. You might be a prying crop saver as you go. You have a monitor mount over here on the right-hand side that can go into another number of different positions in order to mount a display. You also have a whole bunch of funny electrical connectors in a tractor that you may not recognize. It's not just the 12-volt DC cigarette outlet.
There's connectors in a tractor like this that allow some of this precision farming stuff to connect to the tractor's electronic system or to be able to be routed out the back of the machine without pinching wires in the windows and that kind of stuff. You end up with several different connectors in here for power and communications that aren't always used unless you've got another monitor up here on the side that requires them.
If I have a takeaway from this video, it's that mid-sized tractors can be awesome too. Oftentimes, we look to these aspirational huge 300-horsepower machines that are out in the field and not recognize the amount of that technology and innovation that trickles down into the mid-sized utility tractor. There's a lot of really cool stuff in here. I admire the folks at New Holland and the finishing of a lot of these tractors. There's a lot of automotive feel to a machine like this and a lot of thought that goes into smart control layouts.
It feels like you're driving around almost in your luxury SUV sometimes. Given the amount of hours that you spend in a tractor like this, oftentimes many more hours that you might spend in your car or truck, but I think there's a lot of justification for those kinds of things at the end of the day. There are other machines that are simple utilitarian models if that's what you're looking for and you're not into the electronic loader valves.
Some of the things that excite me about tractors like this, those models exist, but it's cool that the envelope continues to be pushed on this kind of stuff as well when it comes to comfort and configurability in a tractor like this. If you're shopping for a piece of equipment and we can help or if you have parts or service needs for a machine you've already got, give us a call at Messick's. We're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.
