World’s biggest Tractors
Here are a few pictures of the world’s largest tractor.
The “Big Bud 16V-747” was built in 1978 by Northern Manufacturing /Big Bud Tractors, Inc. of Havre, Montana. It was custom built for Rossi Brothers Farms, in Bakersfield, California, to pull ripper plows to depths of 3 or 4 feet through cotton fields. The behemouth weighs 100,000 pounds and rides on eight, 40-inch-wide tires that stand 8 feet tall. It is 14 feet to the top of the cab, 20 feet wide, and carries 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel.
A V-16, 1,472 cu.in. Detroit Diesel with twin turbos churns out 900 horsepower. “That motor has a potential of up to 1,100 horsepower,” said current owner Robert Williams. “It can handle our biggest equipment at the current setting, so there’s no advantage to burning more fuel and putting more stress on the drivetrain.” Williams and his brother, Randy, farm 12,000 acres near Big Sandy, Montana. They use the world’s largest tractor to pull an 80-foot wide chisel plow. On a good day, it tills 800 to 900 acres between sunrise and sunset. (A square mile is 640 acres.)
The Williams bought the big tractor from a corporate farm in Florida, which had bought it from the Rossi’s when they disbanded their California operation. The Williams had the machine disassembled in Florida and hauled to Montana on several flatbed tractor-trailers, and reconditioned the machine to like-new condition. The Big Bud 16V-747 cost $300,000 when it was built in 1977. Industry experts estimate it would cost close to $600,000 to duplicate it today. Interestingly, it’s still running on it’s original tires.
“They were custom built up in Canada, with a real hard rubber compound,” Robert Williams. “They’ve been over hundreds of thousands of acres with all that horspower tearing at them, but they’re still in pretty good shape.” While there are dozens of “smaller, “ 400- and 500-hp Big Bud-brand tractors roaming farms, and one 740-hp “little brother” to the 16V-747, the 900-hp model stands as the world’s largest farm tractor. “We’ve had people from all over the world come see it,” said Williams. “We welcome visitors, and if it’s on a day when it’s running in the field, we might give them a ride.”
Also there so a john deere…
Deere & Company, founded in 1837 (collectively called John Deere), has grown from a one-man blacksmith shop into a corporation that today does business around the world and employs approximately 56,000 people. The company continues to be guided, as it has been since its beginning, by the core values exhibited by its founder: integrity, quality, commitment and innovation.
