One of my favorite old tractors. Kubota G2160 Diesel Lawn Tractor

Neil from Messick's here to show you what is one of my favorite tractors, a tractor that I actually owned for a short while. This is a Kubota G2160, a garden tractor that was made back in the early 2000s, back when big heavy garden tractors were made. The industry has kind of moved on the subcompacts at this point. This machine was ultimately replaced by Kubota's GR series. But not only is this one of the last big, heavy garden tractors that Kubota made, it also has a really unique bagging system on the rear of it that I think is extremely cool. So today I'm going to walk you around in older tractor here, one that is for sale. You'll find it on the used section of our website. It says a Kubota G2160-R48S.

Now the basic technology here really isn't anything that's all that exciting. This is an older, big diesel garden tractor, right? Nice, simple machine, phenomenally reliable, but nothing too fancy about it. But if you look down here at the mower deck, you'll look at both the left side or the right side and notice that there's no discharge. This deck actually discharges out the middle and up into this collection system here on the back. It's not a rear discharge deck, rather it's a deck that actually has a channel that flows through the deck and discharges that grass through the middle of the machine so that you don't have tubes hanging on the outside of your deck. Any traditional bagging system is usually going to have large tubes coming up the side here. They make it difficult to trim up against things and really add a lot to the overall width of your machine. But this is a unique rear discharge bagging machine. Then not only does this thing here on the back, this direct shoot bag or sit and catch those clippings, it also has two cool features to it when it comes to dumping and cleaning out that shoot, that connection point between the deck and the bags.

Now on your tractor, if you're bagging and you need to go empty your bags after you've made a handful of passes around your property, you may have to hop off your machine and go lift those big, heavy bags and dump them. But not on this. After we start this tractor up, we can hydraulically dump our bags simply by reaching over here on your left-hand side and pulling the lever. You're able to swing this up and out of the way and allow all the grass from this large hopper to drop down into a pile.

Now if you're used to a typical bagger with that tube coming back from your mower deck to the bags, you're going to know that in thick, heavy, and wet grass, it sometimes doesn't take a whole lot to clog those tubes up, which is a pain in the butt, right? At which point you've got to stop your machine. You got to hop off. You have to remove the tubes, shake all the grass out of it so that you can get that air flow going through the tubes again. But not on this. This has got a really short connection point from the mower deck back here to this hopper, only about say 18 inches or so. But in the case that you manage to clog up that tunnel through here, there's a lever on the back with a trap door in it that will actually kick that grass forward and throw it back into the bag and allow you to clean it out without ever having to dig back in here or remove a little shoot. It's a really slick system for moving the grass from the mower deck into the hopper.

So to me, this was one of the ideal mowing tractors. We sold quite a few of them. It had the right mix of durability and features, and a really innovative bagging system for collecting your grass. But ultimately this machine was discontinued when the GR series was introduced. That came out with Kubota's glide steer transmission that made the tractor much more maneuverable than what this machine would be, but removed this bagging option. Now interestingly enough, this is actually still offered today in Europe. Kubota doesn't sell it here in the United States. They actually build the GR series tractors with this hopper collection unit on the back of it at KMA in Georgia, and then export that tractor to Europe. It's not sold here in the States today even though the technology is still in the product line.

Now as silly as that is, why would you build the machine here in the States and not actually sell it here? I've always been told it comes down to mowing performance. This mower deck doesn't perform quite as  well as a typical side discharge or mulching mower deck does with this discharge system of having to get the clippings into the middle of the deck and then have enough speed and volume to get them back into the hopper. You can imagine this is quite a long way to go without some kind of vacuum or powered system in the middle there to project the clippings back into the bags.

If you take a country as large as what the United States is, our mowing conditions are wildly different in different parts of the country, and we happen to fertilize our grass a lot more than what other countries may. And so in Europe, this is very appropriate for their mowing conditions, but here in the US, maybe where I'm at up here in the Northeast where my grass has to be mowed twice a week right now to keep after it, this doesn't meet the expectations of every customer. I, though, really like it. I think it's awesome. I owned one for a while and it worked fantastically well for me. I wish Kubota would offer this machine here in the US with the caveats that there might be some conditions and there might be some customers where it's not the perfect machine for in those specific applications. We talk about application a lot here at Messick's, and we're going and talking about different tractors and attachments and that kind of stuff of what they're good for, and there's an application conversation here that needs to be made.