Sustainability-Enhancing Farm Tires

July 30, 2024

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How Ag Tires Can Help Improve Sustainability

Sustainability is a topic that’s seemingly always near the top of farmers’ minds. A sustainable farm operates efficiently, protects its valuable natural resources, and makes the most of its investments, resulting in fewer expenses and more profits. Today’s farmers employ a number of strategies to increase sustainability, including tire choice.

The Four Characteristics of a Sustainability-Enhancing Farm Tire

A sustainability-enhancing farm tire improves performance, reduces compaction, and delivers long service life.

1. Increased Performance

One of the primary ways ag tires help farmers improve sustainability is by boosting equipment performance. High-tech and innovative radial tires carry heavier loads, deliver better traction, and can travel at higher speeds than their bias-ply predecessors.

VF tires, like our range of Alliance Agriflex+ tires, can carry up to 40% more load at the same inflation pressure than conventional radials. This means more time in the field, fewer trips traveling back and forth to the bin or to a trailer in the headlands, and ultimately less fuel consumed. VF tires also produce a wide footprint, which puts the optimal amount of tread on the ground. This ensures superb traction, less slipping, and improved fuel consumption.

Because many of today’s farms include fields separated by paved and gravel roads, they require tires capable of delivering performance not just in the field, but also on the road—delivering less rolling resistance, burning less fuel, and providing a smooth ride. Or, more practically, getting them to and between fields quickly and enabling them and their equipment to work efficiently once there.

Manufacturers like Alliance are delivering tires that meet the all-surface needs of farmers in a variety of ways, from high-speed ratings to unique tread patterns. For example, hybrid tread patterns—like what’s found on the Agriflex 363 and Agriflex 389—blend the self-cleaning of an R-1 tire, the wear resistance of an R-4 tire, and the multitude of biting edges of an R-3 tire into one do-it-all tire.

2. Improved Fuel Efficiency

The right tires can help improve the fuel efficiency of tractors, which is a boon to both a farmer’s bottom line and sustainability efforts. This is especially important when you consider that big MFWA and 4WD tractors burn a lot of fuel, consuming anywhere from 24 to 30 gallons of diesel an hour when doing fieldwork.

VF tires, like those in our Agriflex+ range, can operate at lower inflation pressures than bias ply and traditional radial tires. This allows the tire to produce a larger footprint, put more tread on the ground, reduce slip (when the tires turn faster than a tractor’s ground speed), and ultimately use your tractor’s power and fuel more efficiently.

While some wheel slip is optimal—anywhere from 8% to 12% for MFWD and 4WD tractors depending on the soil surface—too much slip can cost you fuel. For every 1% past optimal slip, you lose an equivalent 1% in productivity and reduce your energy efficiency, which can add up to a ton of fuel through a cycle like planting or harvest.

The best thing about slip is that it’s easy to monitor. Most tractors have slip meters on their displays, so you can see the difference right from the cab.

3. Soil Preservation

While expensive equipment and costly infrastructure stand out on a balance sheet, you can make a compelling argument that soil is a farmer’s most valuable resource. Keeping the land healthy is critical to large and lasting yields.

Here again, VF tires offer farmers a considerable benefit if they would rather protect soil than maximize load. VF tires can operate at up to 40% less inflation while carrying the same load as a standard radial tire. This allows VF tires to produce a large contact patch and better distribute the weight of increasingly large, heavy equipment, minimizing its impact on the soil—a precious, non-renewable resource (the NRCS says it can take “thousands” of years to form topsoil).

For farmers, minimizing soil compaction also leads to more productive crops. It’s harder for crops to grow in compacted soil, which forces them to expend extra energy to push through compacted layers—energy it would otherwise use to grow. Compacted soil also slows water infiltration, preventing farmers from maximizing another natural resource.

4. Service Life

Farmers require tires that perform, but they also need tires that last—helping keep expenses down, reducing the odds of costly downtime, and keeping tires working and out of the landfill. Tire manufacturers like Alliance continue to innovate new methods for increasing the durability, lifespan, and sustainability of ag tires.

For example, all of our Alliance Agriflex VF tires are steel belted. This provides exceptional puncture protection and enables them to deliver a wide, uniform footprint and wear evenly. Steel also dissipates heat—the number one enemy of tire longevity—better than other ply materials.

The formulation of specialized compounds—like those that resist stubble—also allows tires to last longer. These compounds are more resilient to the punctures and erosion caused by the robust, puncture-threatening, damage-causing stalks of today’s high-yielding hybrid crops, as well as to wear from abrasive road surfaces.

Educating About Tire Sustainability

Farm tires are getting more sophisticated and are better poised to help farmers meet their sustainability goals than ever. That said, farmers need to know how to utilize their tires to achieve the best results.

A common mistake of farmers is failing to operate ag tires at their optimal inflation pressure. Knowing how to calculate the proper inflation pressure for tires based on the weight of the load they will carry and the speed they’ll travel and ensuring that they’re inflated to that pressure is key to getting the most performance, protection, and life from your tires. In fact, new innovations like Central Tire Inflation Systems (CTIS) are becoming more common and allow inflation adjustments to be made between the road and the field with the push of a button.

Pairing the right tire to an application is another way farmers can boost the productivity, efficiency, and sustainability of their operation. Alliance produces application-specific tires—that is, tires made for the specific challenges facing real-world customers—that perform better and last longer than just buying a tire based on the R-1 designs that have been in use for 100 years.

Lastly, understanding how all the tires on your farm work together allows farmers to see the big picture. Alliance’s Whole Farm Concept is our commitment to delivering a low-pressure solution for every piece of equipment that enters the field. In other words, it ensures that your planter, sprayer, combine, etc., have access to the same low-pressure, high-performance tires that your tractor does. After all, much of the benefit of reducing compaction with low-pressure tires on your tractor is erased if you’re in the field later with old-fashioned, high-pressure tires.

Alliance Whole Farm Concept

Alliance Tires

Alliance Tires only plays a small role in farm sustainability, but it’s a role we take seriously. We continue to work toward delivering farmers tires that help make their operation more efficient, profitable, and sustainable through investments in everything from research and development to manufacturing to educating our customers, dealers, and personnel about our tires.