Tractor Fads

The post about the Belarus below got me thinking about the late 1970's when most dealers here took on a second tractor line as most farmers were in shock over the steep annual price increases back then. SAME was the big pickup as the chain store Case dealer had them plus a couple of Deere dealers. A few dealers had Deutz as their second tractor line and the Belarus' seemed to be handled mainly by independent dealers. Even though the 1980's were tough for nearly all the dealers here it seems the foreign tractor lines were gone even before the mid-1980's mergers. If they were not and your brand was caught up in a merger you needed to dump the second tractor line to keep your major. I don't remember much of anything happening here with makes such as Long.

A couple of the Ford dealers where I grew up did Longs, I always assumed they were some kind of overseas Ford. Our New Holland Dealer (before they were bought by Ford) did Leylends before they folded in the US. Our Deutz guy was stand alone, meaning Deutz was all he did, ran the store out of his farm that was out in the country. Of course we were old time back then. Our County seat had an Allis Dealer just outside the city on a state highway, they ran the store from a Quonset hut. Deere dealer was stand alone on the federal route north of town, the New Holland/Leylend guy about a mile further out, we had an IH dealer for a while in town, did Farmalls, motorcycles and atvs IIRC when they folded the NH guy picked them up for a while before they shut down. The MF/New Idea guys where in one of the Hardware stores in town. Don't ever remember an Oliver dealer in the area, the only one I ever found was about 50 miles south of us. We used a JD dealer that was out in the country in a little town that wasn't much of a town anymore, they lost their franchise but stayed around for a while as a repair shop that had more JD parts than the JD dealer. The IH dealer we used most was in a smaller town in the next county over they did IH farm equipment AND trucks. Fast forward 35 years, my sister in law is from that town and they moved back home when they retired, our old IH dealer is now a John Deere store.