Kubota BX23S

The sentence owners keep writing about this machine is some version of it will do anything a bigger tractor will do, it just takes longer — and they mean it literally. One owner re-landscaped a quarter-acre corner lot with it: tore out everything, brought in yards of stone, moved seven yards of decomposed granite and planed it flat, removed trees and trenched for drainage and irrigation. He estimates a skid steer would have done it in about twenty hours against his fifty, and that the skid steer costs three times as much. Another unloaded roughly ten cords of log-length wood off an 18-foot trailer over a weekend and says he would never have attempted it without the machine. A third has run one for six years in northern Ontario trenching, grading, clearing snow and pulling stumps, and calls it reliable, comfortable and tough.

The universal caveat is loader capacity, and owners raise it more often than any other subject. The same six-year owner calls the lift quite marginal and describes his own attempts to move wood and lumber as half-hearted. Others report carrying a third of a firewood tote at a time, being underwhelmed lifting on pallet forks, struggling to pull an engine because the lift height runs out, and barely clearing the four-foot sides of a dump trailer with a full bucket of wet dirt. Two owners independently recommend a quick-attach coupler as the single best option — worth it purely for bucket-to-fork swaps, with one saying he would step up to a B-series before giving up the quick-attach if its weight cost him capacity. Both also warn that the front tire sidewalls wear quickly under loader work, and that a rear ballast box is not optional unless the backhoe is on.

On the backhoe, owners who have one are more positive than the received wisdom. One reports the hoe's breakout force exceeding a small mini excavator's and has pulled three-foot rocks out of his driveway; another says nothing has defeated it except rock and stumps, which simply take longer; and several note it pops off easily with the frame brackets staying on the tractor. The honest limits they give are swing arc and travel — you cannot scoop, swing and dump like a mini excavator, so you are climbing off to reposition. Pricing is the other recurring shock: owners who paid around $25,000 out the door in 2020 with a deck, forks and a sprayer report current quotes closer to $38,000, and Kubota appears not to discount below list, with the only real lever being the length of the 0% term.