Farmall Cubs are great for small cultivation tasks, furrowing, middle busting potatoes, sickle mowing a few acres, moving small volumes of snow, and moving small trailers, but larger tasks that come with a larger property really require more power.
After searching for a capable tractor, we found a 1954 Farmall Super M with a Schwartz wide front, power steering, and a DuAl 340 loader and added it to our farm at the end of the summer of 2023.
We immediately put the Super M to work clearing overgrown spaces on our property in anticipation of fencing and creating pastures. We have also moved materials, and cleared snow from driveways and easements with the loader.
The Super M is very capable with a 4.3L 4 cylinder engine and close to 50 horsepower. It is more than capable of clearing unwanted greasewood from areas that we would like to have animals pasture on, as it was intended to pull 3 bottom plows.
After a year of owning and using the Super M ‘as-is’, we gave it a new life by rewiring all the electrical, adding a key start ignition, fabricating a three point hitch, stripped the Lift-All unit and replaced the whole hydraulic system with a modernized one running off of the IH live hydraulic pump. The power steering gets dedicated power from a priority valve, the exhaust has a new exhaust stack, and the intake has been converted to a cold air intake with a large filter, bypassing the oil bath air cleaner. We also added a catch can to catch any case blow-by and pressurized gasses from escaping to the atmosphere.
A 12 volt negative ground conversion, a carburetor rebuild, and some fine tuning, have also helped turn the very classic Super M into a more useful tractor, more similar to a modern tractor capable of handling 3 point implements than the more limited classic tractor we started with.
We paid 3k dollars for our tractor, and put another 1k into modernizing it with hydraulics and steel. Of course, we save a bunch by fabricating stuff ourselves, but we could have purchased a vintage Saginaw 3 point hitch from Steiner for 1,399.99 bucks, and nearly 600 more in shipping. At the end of the day, our modernized Super M is significantly cheaper and more capable than a used 40 hp tractor that would cost more than 10 times what we have invested in the Super M so far. — and if you asked us, its just way more awesome keeping this American beast of equipment alive and working seven decades after it came off of the assembly line.