Neil from Messick's here with today's Three-Minute Thursday. Today's short conversation is going to be about horsepower and all the varying standards that exist that are a little bit confusing. 

We spent a lot of time on our channel talking about specifications of products. You might not be surprised to find that there's a lot of varying specifications that are actually used for something as simple as horsepower. We all like to have this one number in our head that defines how powerful something is. With a tractor, you just simply don't have that. There's a lot of different numbers floating around that mean a lot of different things. 

From the get-go, there's really four different horsepower numbers that are used for a piece of equipment. We're going to start at the top, the biggest number, and work our way down. The very top, you've got what's known as gross engine horsepower. That's rated by a standard called J1995. That's basically the horsepower that an engine can produce on a test stand, not in a piece of equipment, not with air cleaners, radiators, alternators, all that additional equipment that's needed to put that engine into a tractor. 

It's simply a test stand number. Of course, when you go to work, your engine isn't sitting on a test stand. It's in your piece of equipment and that's where the standard J1395 comes into play. That standard is when you've taken that engine out and added on all the required hardware for that engine to actually go to work. It's going to include your electrical and cooling systems and tell you how much horsepower that engine is able to produce coming out of its crank. 

Really, the most important horsepower number on a tractor is back here and it's PTO, your PTO horsepower. That's going to tell you the amount of horsepower that's actually being able to be delivered out the back shaft on the tractor and can assume too that it's also being able to be delivered to the tires, so that's taking into account all the parasitic losses that happen inside of a tractor from its transmission and related gearing components. 

That's an important number because this is a place now that you'll start to see some differences between manufacturers and their ability to build efficient transmissions and also between different transmission types and their inherent parasitic losses. Our fourth and final spec number is back here at the drawbar. Now, this is something that you're generally only going to find for large field-oriented tractors, not smaller ones. 

A lot of times, you'll find drawbar horsepowers posted as well. These are often also tested and verified by the Nebraska tractor testing lab. If you're a numbers guy, they've got a lot of fascinating things that you can dive into and take a look where they go through and actually verify a lot of the specifications that manufacturers have put to their report. There are a lot of places where you can get easily confused or maybe even deceived when it comes to these specifications numbers. 

When you go through a manufacturer spec sheet and you flip over to the back of that glossy literature, different companies tend to list different information on those spec sheets and they're not always listing exactly the same things. It took a couple of minutes and went through and checked major tractor manufacturers. Some are going to publish both the gross engine horsepower and the net engine horsepower, giving you both of those numbers. 

Most of the time when manufacturers are using the horsepower in the model number, it's usually based off that gross engine horsepower number. I went through a couple of the smaller companies too. They tend to be a little bit loose with their specifications and found several instances where you go through that glossy spec sheet and you were only listed with one engine horsepower number with no footnotes telling you exactly what it is, whether it's gross or net or what SAE standard it's measured by. 

There are places that you want to read between the lines. If you're seeing that where both numbers aren't listed, more often than not, they're publishing the higher gross number and just bearing the net one. Just to give you some real-world examples of how some of this plays out onto the spec sheets, I took this Kubota L3901 and compared it to the John Deere and Mahindra equivalent. 

If you go through and you look at the John Deere spec sheet, they are one of these companies that does not actually even list the net horsepower. It's only a gross number and it doesn't tell you in the spec sheet that it's gross. If you look there, it just says horsepower with an asterisk by it. Down in the footnotes at the bottom, it will tell you that it's measured by J1995. Now, that is the gross horsepower standard even though it doesn't say in the top that it's gross. 

The net number is really the more true of those. Again, we don't test our engines in a test stand. They go under the hood, but know that's what you're looking. You don't have both numbers there. Mahindra would fall under that category of companies. It doesn't tell you at all what they're doing. There's just simply one horsepower number on every one of their spec sheets with no reference whatsoever by what standard they're testing to. 

That gets really sketchy because there are many, many standards across the industry in many, many different ways that engines can be measured. If we go and dive into the PTO horsepower numbers, though, this is another place that I saw a standout. This Kubota L3901 that I'm standing beside here is 37.5 gross engine horsepower. The Deere 3038E is 37.2 gross horsepower, so only three-tenths of a horsepower between them. 

When you dive into the PTO horsepower, you'll notice that the Kubota has a two-horsepower advantage going out the PTO, telling you that their tractor is more efficient and able to put more of that power to the ground and would actually be, say, 78% more powerful because of it, even though they're both basically the same gross engine horsepower. I'm going to tell you if you go and you've watched a lot of my videos, we put way too much stock in horsepower. 

The only reason we talk about this is because I know a lot of guys like to break out Excel and line all of these numbers up side by side. Really, that's an extremely challenging and difficult thing to do with all the variations in the way that tractors can be measured and specified. If you're only seeing a handful of numbers without asterisks telling you what standards are used when they come up with, this applies to loaders and mowers and three-point hitches and you name it, it just can be very, very challenging to go through and do an accurate comparison of tractors by the numbers. 

That's why I'm always going to cycle back in and say that it's far, far better to experientially buy a tractor. Don't try to do it on paper. Get into a couple of dealerships. Put your butt in the seat. Drive the machines around. Feel out the dealerships and make your purchase based upon that, not solely upon these numbers which, in the wrong hands, can be twisted to look like something that they're actually not. If you're going through that buying process and we can help, give us a call at Messick's. Also available for any parts and service needs that you have. We're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.