pigiron

Hello Texas Oaks, without knowing your budget, it's hard to give you accurate advice that will help you.

From what your describing as a workdescription, I would suggest a tractor with 70-90 horsepower. I personally only buy John Deere, but there are many quality tractors out there(Massey Ferguson, Case, etc.) that will do the job just fine for you. If your just planting food plots, and ditch cleaning try pricing a used John Deere 5525. It's 91 horsepower, which is more than plenty for what your doing. You can pull a 12' disk, and a 4 bottom plow with no problem. Deere makes a nice front end loader set-up for their 5000 series tractors, as well as a backhoe attachment. A brand new 5525 base tractor with 4WD goes for about 35 grand, add 4,500.00 and they'll throw in an air conditioned cab. The front end loader is about 7000.00.I'm not sure what the backhoe attachment costs but as you can see it's certainly not cheap. The good thing is they offer 0% financing.

If you don't want to go new, you could easily find a used Deere or another make with a loader and backhoe attachment included(I see them all of the time)on Tractorhouse.com

You definately can get by with a smaller rig, like the 5025, or for that matter anything in their 5000 series(their considered utility tractors)with both attachmentsfor less money, but I would look for somthing that would be versitile in this manner.......Ceck-em out on the Deere websight. (didn't mean to throw you offf with the bigger one, but sometimes the lighter tractors are limited, especially when you want to do as much as you have in mind.)

Good Luck.