Even if we don’t know the term, we’ve all seen badge engineering at work. Take a vehicle platform of one brand name, change it up a little, add new paint and a different badge and call it…
1962 FORD 2000
The early 1960s brought a lot of changes to the worldwide Ford ag equipment manufacturing empire. Ford announced a new organization, Ford…
By the mid-1960s, Minneapolis-Moline had a long history of success behind it, but in all that history, they had not yet built a big, six-cylinder-powered row crop tractor. What’s a row crop…
The Fordson tractor line started in 1916 as another chip off the old Ford block. Henry Ford Company was dominating the American auto market with the legendary Model-T when the founder’s…
When you think of products from Italy, tractors probably don’t immediately come to mind, yet over the years some of the most unusual and effective tractors have come from there.
Companies take a big risk when they introduce something radically different than the norm. When the historical smoke clears, which might be decades down the road, they will be judged heroes or…
Nothing is more pleasing than finding an old tractor that can still run, and looks great while doing so. Most vintage tractors are eventually tossed aside and left to rust alone in unkempt…
The ’55 Diesel debuted in 1949 as the big diesel tractor in the Massey-Harris lineup. Despite some teething problems, it established a reputation as a gutsy tractor, and by the mid…
When John Deere introduced four new tractors at its big New Generation of Power extravaganza in Dallas, August 30, 1960, it was became clear the company had a couple of big hits on its hands…
The British County tractor isn’t one you see often here in the States, but you may wonder why not after seeing one. The story begins after World War I at Fleet, Hampshire, England. Ernest and…
Out with the old and in with the new. You’ve heard that expression a million times. In the late 1950s, International Harvester was bringing in the new at a very rapid pace. The new…
Cletrac began in 1916 as the Cleveland Motor Plow Company with a three-wheeled tractor design. Before the patent was even issued for it, the company switched to tracklayers after seeing the…
We’ve talked a lot over the years about how the big, high-powered tractors evolved. Nowhere were they needed more than in the plains states, where you could run for miles making just one row.…
In the 1950s, Massey-Ferguson had a line of tractors that were near the top of the quality and performance curve. Massey-Ferguson (M-F) wasn’t a big outfit but they had a sizeable enough slice…
