Time For A Tire Change

FTLComm - Tisdale - February 12, 1999
We all hear about the cost of doing business and how farming is an expensive venture, but it takes a look at a scene like this to bring some of those costs into perspective. This massive tractor cost's is operator considerable more then a suburban house in a city and can get ten years of wandering fields with seventy-two feet of deep tillage dragging behind it to wear those tires down to the point were they need to be replaced. It has eight tires, each about $1,000 each. For such an expensive piece of equipment, $800 a year for tires seems not that remarkable, until you realise that tires are one of the lowest costs of farming. Fuel, insurance, oil, spare parts, make up only a few of the many fixed costs that rank well above the cost of a few millimetres of rubber that is scrubbed off each summer. This picture was taken at Fairburn Tire.