Fendt Fits The Bill For This Cattleman
The Fendt 716 speeds up work and makes a busy cattleman’s life easier.
By Jamie Cole | Photos By Jamie Cole and Sullivan Cole

Bryce Chaffee remembers making the drive from the dealership, Lowe & Young, in Wooster, Ohio, back to the farm with his new Fendt 716 tractor. “I’m driving up the road and I have people calling me… ‘Look, Chaffee got a Fendt!’ It was crazy, like an ‘Elvis is alive’-kinda thing,” he laughs.
He was introduced to the brand by a camper at CF Ranch and Cattle (see the full story about his operation here) who was working on a nearby dairy farm that “has four or five of these things,” says Bryce. “He’d text me these videos, and say, ‘Come down here and look inside this thing.’” Bryce test-drove the 716 at Lowe & Young with sales manager Dave Colvin, “and it was pretty much a done deal,” he says. “I saw how versatile this thing is and the horsepower is exactly what I needed.”
Bryce says he and his son Luke found the technology in the cab “pretty self-explanatory,” and they were putting the 716 to work right away. “We do a lot of brush hogging with it, we do a lot of baling, tedding, raking, small square bales, everything we do here,” he says. But it shines on a chore that was previously much more of a hassle. “This thing is amazing at mowing hay,” he says. “I can get a lot of stuff done in a really short period of time.”
Besides the time savings, Bryce says they’re now not so exhausted from the long work days between the clinic and the farm business. “You can fly across the field four times as fast, hardly even feel a bump, air conditioner’s going, radio’s going… it’s calm, it’s cool in there, comfortable. It just glides across the earth. That’s pretty awesome.”
Cost of ownership was also a surprise. “The efficiency of this is amazing,” he says. “I ran this probably 20 hours and finally had to fill up.”
Versatility saves time and money too. His legacy equipment was no problem to run. “You have so many options there. I can run 99% of the equipment I want to run. I don’t have to figure out what other (tractor) I want to use. This will do it. This will do it all.”