The Front End Carrier brings a combination of low cost and efficient use for many applications. It greatly reduces the manual work required for many jobs, as compared with other techniques and equipment. Possible uses of the Carrier can be put into four categories: 

Examples of materials that might be loaded and carried are tree limbs and trunks, tools, fencing, lumber, hay, roofing, masonry, fire-wood, fertilizer and seed bags, nursery stock, volleyball standards, and many more. The main advantage of the Carrier for this purpose is that the deck can be lowered to within a few inches of the ground, thus facilitating the loading of objects, especially heavy objects. For example, tree trunk sections of a few hundred pounds can be rolled onto the deck. As another example, the deck can be raised to the level of a trailer or truck bed to ease the movement of certain heavy objects onto or off of the Carrier. Another advantage for the loading of many materials is that a tractor is much more maneuverable than a truck and especially a trailer, enabling the operator to get very close to the material to be loaded. And a tractor can move into muddy, soft, or weedy areas that might be inaccessible to a truck or trailer.

The volume capacity of the Carrier cannot be stated with a single number, because it depends on the type of material, stacking, and overlapping of material. Generally speaking, the volume is roughly the same as that of a full-size pickup truck. Note that the area of the truck bed (with the tailgate up) is about 8'x5' = 40 ft.², the same as the area of the 10-foot wide Carrier, which is 10'x4´ = 40 ft.².

For the brush application, the Carrier can be tilted backward as more brush is loaded on it, with the deck and back forming a "V" shape that permits piling the brush quite high without it falling off. And it is entirely possible to put limbs onto the Carrier that are longer than the width of the Carrier (8 or 10 feet, say), as long as the operator can still maneuver between trees in driving to the unloading site. The sixth figure in the Gallery page shows the same load as the fifth figure, but now dumped  into the bed of a full size pickup truck with the tailgate down. (Much of the load spilled out of the truck and had to be piled back onto the truck bed by hand.) Both the Carrier and the truck were piled and stacked high, with substantial overlap, and it is fair to say that the truck was fully loaded.

The task of collecting brush can be performed by one person, who stops the tractor at a suitable spot near brush, gets off, works his way around the area picking up brush and throwing it onto the Carrier, and then moves the tractor on to another spot. As an alternative, an operator can work with one or two "walkers," following the walker(s) around as he or she picks up brush and throws it onto the Carrier without wasting any steps. Whenever the operator goes to the unloading site, the walker(s) can continue working, making piles here and there to speed up loading when the operator returns. 

We comment also that the Carrier can be helpful in some applications for which the brush is to be chipped instead of burned. Sometimes a chipper is pulled along as the brush is picked up, and the brush is placed directly into the chipper, with the chips being unloaded into the pulling truck or onto the ground. However, it may be preferable to keep the chipper stationary and use the Carrier if:  (a) the chipper is not very mobile, (b) there is not a suitable truck for pulling it and receiving the chips, (c) the (extreme) noise made by the chipper is unacceptable (e.g., on a college campus or golf course), or (d) the chipper is to be rented and the user wishes to gather all of the brush into one area before renting the chipper.

The second usage category cited above is unloading. For materials such as brush, the operation of unloading produces the most obvious advantage of the Carrier, since it requires virtually no manual effort. The operator simply moves to the brush pile, raises the Carrier up high, and then tilts the deck downward to dump it. This technique can be used on piles up to several feet high, and on piles that are burning, after they have burned down some. By contrast, unloading a truck or trailer requires substantial manual effort (about fifteen minutes for one man to unload a pickup truck), and possibly requires throwing fairly heavy objects up onto the pile and/or cutting objects into smaller pieces.

For materials that need to be unloaded by hand, the Carrier can be beneficial because of the ability to change its height. It might be positioned close to the ground for rolling or sliding items off, it might be positioned at waist height to eliminate stooping to pick things up, or it might be positioned high to facilitate unloading onto a high surface such as a second floor or a roof.