Quote Originally Posted by missionary5155 View Post
Some years back an old ( well older than me) Deere man was hauling me around his central ILL-nois area. We came across a farm with a long row of "green" well restored tractors. So brakes were applied and we of course invested some time "inspecting" the green herd.
Towards the end I asked "So where are the Olivers"? That set off a tirade of verbal abuse that was well played out the rest of the day.
only ever saw a couple of olivers, john deer was as uncommon here before 1965 - before 1950 I reckon every second ag tractor was a lanz bulldog in our part of the country most of the rest were red - International and massey harris - a few fordsons -about 1960-65 our own grown Chamberlain brand got going strong .
Deer got most of their success in Europe and downunder by corporate buyout -Europe they bought Lanz and dissappeared those tractors - did the same in Australia about 1975? they bought Chamberlain to get the dealer network, made crossbred yellow tractors for a while to fulfil goverment conditions, and soon as that expired they closed the aussie factory and disappeared the aussie made machines. At a time when most other makers were peddling junk, IH had exploding rear ends, Massey ferguson had exploding midsections, and ford managed to perfect the "thin wall casting" exploding engine -none of them wanted to know you when they broke, JD took the opposite tack - they identified the faults, owned it, put a program in place to rectify the problem - I had several warranty call programs done to my tractor to fix things that had not broken yet - a novel approach at the time got them a lot of business - I bet they are not doing that anymore (the sales war has been won) . When I was a kid H V McKay - Massey- Harris (later MF) owned the harvester and cultivation market in this country MF management threw it down the toilet trying to force broadacre farmers into using linkage equipment . At present seeing a surge in the resale value of those old 70's /80's articulated tractors - I expect that to continue - anything pre computer days, as long as its not green - old versatiles, acremasters, steigers, truck motors, truck trannies, they can actually be fixed - its either that or pay a million bucks for a new green one.