Top Mini Excavator Attachments by Use: Agriculture and Farming

While you might think of a mini excavator as a small machine best reserved for use on the job site, either for roadwork, construction, or demolition, it’s time to reassess that conviction.

When equipped with some of the following mini excavator attachments, a mini excavator can be an indispensable machine in agricultural settings.

And the machine you have is better than the one you don’t, so if you do have one, get the most out of it through the following attachments.

Buckets

Just like skid steer bucket attachments, mini excavator bucket attachments are the be-all, end-all of mini excavator attachments.

Though they are highly generalized, they can pretty much do it all.

A bucket attachment with teeth can be used for trenching or digging holes for planting. They can also be used to grade or profile land or to excavate low areas for farm ponds.

Bucket attachments can also be used in lieu of a ripper or auger. If you don’t have one of these attachments, you can improvise with a bucket.

In addition, bucket attachments can be used in place of compactor. Say you don’t have a trench backfiller or a compactor - a bucket attachment can backfill and pack down the newly filled-in trench.

Buckets can also help with pulling and knocking down trees for land-clearing applications, making them even more useful for farmers and in agricultural settings.

Thumbs

A thumb isn’t quite a mini excavator attachment in its own right. Rather, these are sort of like excavator bucket add-ons or accessories.

Nonetheless, they can be highly useful in agricultural settings.

Equipping a mini excavator bucket with a thumb is like giving it, well, a thumb. It converts the bucket into a sort of grapple bucket which will enable it to close around debris and manipulate it with much greater precision.

Basically, with a thumb, you have a debris grapple. You can use an excavator bucket equipped with a thumb to rip up stumps, carry stumps and logs, move boulders, and pick up and move other large pieces of debris.

Brush Cutters

In many ways, a brush cutter attachment for a mini excavator is even more useful than one for a skid steer, even if only for agricultural purposes.

An excavator is a much more flexible machine with a much greater reach than a skid steer. Therefore, excavators outfitted with brush cutters can clear brush and small trees in hard to reach areas.

For instance, mini excavator brush cutters can be used to cut trails, clear pond banks, and keep other rights of way clear.

They can also be used for clearing out last year’s growth on a fallow field, easily, quickly, and efficiently.

Mulchers

Mulchers, like brush cutters, can be very versatile and highly useful mini excavator attachments for agricultural purposes.

Our mulchers can do basically everything our brush cutters can do but they are more specialized for heavier clearing and mulching applications.

For instance, our mulchers for mini excavators are made with heavy-duty discs, and both shark-style cutting teeth and carbide cutting teeth and can be used for cutting and clearing brush and limbs and even mulching stumps.

They can be used for clearing vegetation and woody debris up to 5” thick, making them perfect for mowing and mulching saplings and dense undergrowth.

Pallet Forks

Pallet forks have a lot more practicality in commercial settings as well as in construction and demolition, but they are not without their uses in agriculture and farming.

For instance, pallet forks, especially adjustable pallet forks, can be used to transport logs, trees and shrubs with root balls, and large rocks, easily and efficiently.

In some instances, they may be even better suited to handle these applications than other mini excavator attachments like buckets.

For ranchers and hunters that live on farms, pallet forks can also be used as a gambrel to suspend slaughters and harvests, for the purpose of skinning, quartering and butchering.

Rippers

Rippers are without a doubt the most generalized mini excavator attachments on this list, but they are very good at what they do - which is ripping stuff up.

One of the prime agricultural uses of a ripper is to pull out old stumps. They are perfect for this. They’re also good for ripping out root mats and other tangles of dense brush and woody debris.

They can also be used to rip out embedded boulders, so they can be helpful for land clearing.

Trenchers

You might associate trencher attachments more closely with skid steers and tractors, but we also sell trencher attachments for mini excavators and they are very useful in agrarian settings.

Trenchers can of course be used for digging trenches which can be useful for planting rows of trees and shrubs. They can also be useful for digging drainage ditches, which are helpful in two different ways.

One, these ditches can be used to irrigate high, dry areas, and two, they can be used for the opposite purpose: to drain low wet areas.

Mini Excavator Augers and Bits

Last but not least we have mini excavator augers and bits, which are also very useful in agricultural settings and on farms.

They have limited application for loosening and aerating extremely dense soil, so if you have a dense, impenetrable rocky or clay-rich soil and no other attachment for tilling, an auger will do.

Augers can also be used for digging deep, straight holes, which gives them tons of utility for planting fence posts and poles, as well as for digging holes for root balls.

Also, mini excavator augers and bits can be used to grind old stumps, so if you don’t have the equipment to tip them out, you may just be able to grind them in situ with an auger and the appropriate bit.

Mini Excavator Attachments That Will Never Surrender

Spartan Equipment is proud to manufacture mini excavator attachments that will Never Surrender, here in the United States with American steel only, and to cover them with generous warranties.

These are some of the top mini excavator attachments for farms and agricultural applications, but we sell many others. If you have any questions about any of our attachments, get in touch with us directly at 1-888-888-1085.