I remember when I was a kid, probably 1112 years old when I asked dad, "What is the lever on the tractor that says 'draft control' for?" My father was a very knowledgeable man about farm equipment, but he gave me a long and rambling explanation that left me more confused than before. I remember he said something about using a plow, and a vague description of a situation when the plow needed to stay level and the tractor knew how to keep it there and then he went on to something else. I pretty well knew he was a little vague on the exact workings of draft control but didn't want me to know that.

Having been on a lot of tractors over the years with a draft control system, and never once using it, I'm not much ahead of dad. Where I live, the glacial till wasn't very kind to us. If you're lucky, in the Ozarks, you have a few inches of topsoil with about a million rocks buried directly below. If you sink a plow in many areas here, it'll go down until it hits the rocks and it'll turn them up on top of the ground. You don't ever have to worry about it sinking into the deep topsoil.

That's what draft control is designed to prevent…a situation where you have a tillage tool in the ground, you hit a soft spot, and it sinks to the bottom of the three point's travel and buries the implement, making a really deep trench. Unless you're farming river bottoms in our area, and usually not even then, you'd never need draft control.

Most compact tractors have a position control lever only. It moves the implement up and down. With that setup, you would drop it all the way down and let the implement go to whatever depth it finds. You might have a deeper trench in some areas than others because of soil conditions. The deluxe tractors, and larger models, that have the draft control, allow you to maintain the depth of the implement at a constant level, regardless of the ground you're tilling.

So that's what draft control is. If you're like me you'll never, ever use it. And if that's the case, you won't need to add it as an option if you're buying a new tractor.

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