Soil Conditioner Attachment is Big Time-and Labor-Saver When Preparing Seedbeds

Michael Garvey says the Bobcat soil conditioner is better than the other brands he tried.

When it comes to preparing a seedbed, you can’t beat the Bobcat® soil conditioner for making the job fast and easy. Featuring a 72-in. roller bar equipped with 121 teeth, it rakes forward and reverse to break up clods, remove rocks and other debris, tear out sod and grade and level the site.

This rugged attachment can be angled manually or hydraulically up to 25 degrees right or left to windrow debris. Attach end plates and you can use it as a box blade. You can also flip up the front wheel bolster to work close to buildings, trees and shrubs and to save trailer space when transporting the soil conditioner. No matter how you use it, the direct-drive motor eliminates chain and sprocket problems.

Michael Garvey uses the versatile soil conditioner with his Bobcat 773T skid-steer loader, equipped with high-flow hydraulics. His company, M. Garvey Landscape Design, a design/build firm in Natick, Mass., serves both residential and commercial customers. The soil conditioner saves him and his crew time and work removing rocks from subsoil, clearing roots from unscreened topsoil, aerating topsoil and tearing up sod. “It works great,” he says. “Our Bobcat loader provides plenty of power to operate it.”

The soil conditioner is built for serious work. For example, on one recent job, he used it to prepare a site for 600 cu. yd. of topsoil.

Garvey bought the attachment after renting it from his dealer, Bobcat of Worcester (Mass.). “It’s better than other brands of soil conditioners that we tried,” he reports. “We usually operate it while going forward. However, we make the last pass going backward to cover up the tire tracks and save a lot of hand raking.”

He chose the hydraulic model which lets him adjust the angle of the roller bar from the operator’s seat of his loader using the Bobcat Attachment Control Kit. “That makes it easy to control where you want the material to go,” he says. “After windrowing the rocks, we use the loader with a bucket to pick them up. That saves us a lot of time and work.”