Would someone with experience running a 706 gas give me an estimate of gal. per hr. I would like to run a 4x4 round baler with it. thanks in advance-Lary

LOL, couldn't resist the smart comment.
Sorry, don't know.......

my neighbor put 50 gallons a day through his on the brush hog, this was the C 263.

mine used 4-6 gallons an hour on average cutting, raking and baling. it was my first and only tractor for three years. as i added more tractors, all diesel, the gasser went down the road as the diesels were much more economical! my ford 7700 does the same work on 1-2 gallons an hour, my 966 does the same work on 2-3 gallons per hour, not to mention farm diesel is cheaper than gas to buy!

casey in SD

Was wondering the same thing. so let's do some math here to see how much per round bale is the difference. Lots of gas 706 tractors in pretty good shape vs. diesels with a lot more hours at roughly $2K more (plus or minus). I have seen good, solid 706G tractors here going for $3K (plus or minus).

I am assuming my situation - I need to do some small operation baling to feed my own cattle and horses. I just got done spending $1400 in hay costs this year. I need around 60-70 1000 lb bales to meet my own needs. I have access to the land for free.

Help me out here if my numbers are not right (I am guessing a lot!)

How many 4x4 1000lb bales can you get off of a 40 acre field? My guess is around 7 bales per acre for first cutting so 280 bales for this field.

I would guess you can cut it in 3 hours with a disc mower, rake it in 2 hours with a v-rake and bale it in 4 hours. so a total of 9 hours to produce 280 bales. (I am really guessing here).

So, 9hours of gas tractor at 6 gal per hour is 56 gals of gas, at $3.00 per gal gives $168. So each bale cost 60 cents in gas.

Same 9 hours of diesel, at 2 gal per hours is 18 gals, at $2.00 per gal (off road assume) is $36. So each bale cost 13 cents in fuel.

So, 47 cents per bale difference. If I divide that into the $2K cost difference, I need to make over 4200 bales of hay to make this cost effective.

And I am not even including maint items. Even if I am off by a factor of 2, I still have to make a heck of a lot of hay to make the cost diff pay. And I would guess that most folks in the larger hay biz would be going after a 100hp newer tractor than a 706. At 100 bales a year, and assuming that I am way off and I need 2000 bales to close the gap, it woult take me 20 years to recover the costs.

Am I all wet here?

John

PS - yes I did not include equipment. But the equipment is capital, not expense. That $1400 is out the door, gone bye-bye, and hits my bottom line costs directly. Purchasing good used equip (3K for a 706G, 3K for a 504G vermeer baler, $1K for a gehl v-rake and maybe 3K for a disc mower) gives me a capital depreciation item, instead of an expense. There is the risk of maint on the equip, but that may be harder to quantify. Bet I could sell a few round bales to cover the maint. though. No guarantees, however.

i use a 706 gas tractor and really like it. the ih blue ribbon service manual says it will use around 1.5 gallons per hour more than a diesel.

I would agree with what you put togather for the msot part. I think you would really need to moving to mow 40 acres in three hours - even with a disk mower but then your fuel usage on the mower and rake will probably be almost half what it will be while on the baler - especially with the gas tractor.

Its when tractor is being worked hard and the governor is really kicking in that fuel economy goes down the tubes on a gas tractor.