Some people might call it a traffic jam, but to the folks who look forward to it every year, it’s the annual Great Eastern Iowa Tractorcade, and it brings out an eclectic collection of old farm tractors, along with equally old farmers and collectors of all ages nostalgic for the days before big agribusiness put eight-wheel monsters into fields of corn and soybeans.
“You can take the boy off the farm,” said a plaque wistfully affixed to the hood of a shiny red McCormick Farmall dating to the 1940s, “but you can’t take the farm out of the boy.”
Photo by: Barrie Alan Peterson for The New York Times
Reflecting the good-natured rivalry among owners of the participating machines, the Farmall displayed a tiny replica of a green John Deere tractor, on its back like a dead bug, inside the glass jar of the air cleaner, where it would be covered by dust filtered out before it could contaminate the tractor’s fuel system.
There’s a fair amount of such rivalry, along with pride of brand, among the men and women who run the tractors, and most of the machines are painted the original colors chosen as trade dress by their manufacturers. There were red Farmalls, green John Deeres, gray-and-blue Fords and Allis-Chalmers, and Minneapolis-Moline machines in orange. The early Case tractors were orange, too, until that brand switched to beige, then black and red. Among the fanciest were the Olivers, with Art Deco paint schemes in gray, green and red.
But along with the rivalry, there was a strong sense of cooperation, as participants shared tools and expertise with one another to overcome rare but inevitable breakdowns along the route.
Each year, a somewhat different route is selected for the Tractorcade. Last June, the parade started in Oelwein, a Fayette County town of about 6,400. Over the three days, it wended along a roughly rectangular route through the northeast Iowa farming towns of Strawberry Point, Elkader, Gunder, Clermont and West Union, before returning to Oelwein.
This year over June 9-11, for the ninth annual event sponsored by the local radio station WMT (www.wmtradio.com), the tractors will follow a route through the southeastern part of the state in a roughly cloverleaf pattern, returning each night to a park in Mount Pleasant.
It has been some time since most of the tractors in this lineup have seen the dust of an actual farm field or pulled cultivating equipment; these are decked out as parade machines, with fresh paint and restored running gear.
Most of the tractors have had a few amenities added that would not have existed in their working days, like passenger seats, picnic coolers, fancy canopies and stereo sound systems.
Gene Bender, a 72-year-old retired aerospace worker, found his old Farmall Model BN in a junkyard in Colorado in 1987, he said. He restored it, added a passenger seat, a rear-view mirror and a picnic cooler and has participated in the Iowa parade for each of the seven years since he retired to Wellman, Iowa.
A special category is reserved for tractors tricked out with luxurious passenger compartments salvaged from trucks, keeping their riders in air-conditioned comfort.
An example is the 1949 Case Model LA tractor that Allen Kraus of Shullsburg, Wis., used on his farm until he retired in 2000. He had added the cab of a 1948 Ford F-5 in the early 1960s, just to make it more comfortable in the fields, and then decided to stretch it out with the old Ford’s fenders and hood as well, for recreational purposes. The tractor, a hit in last year’s Tractorcade, has been a parade machine ever since. Mr. Kraus’s daughter Kathie and son-in-law Steve Schwartz now grow corn and soybeans on about two square miles of his old farm, but the Case LA leads a far more genteel existence.
“The way it’s been, we barely qualified for the 10-mile-an-hour group,” Mr. Kraus said, “but we just changed the sprocket on the chain drive, and now it’ll do about 19 and a half, right up there with the fastest of them.” The cab already has a radio, he said, and next on the list of improvements is air-conditioning. “It doesn’t even need to work, but I just want to say it has air-conditioning.”
Mr. Kraus is a little reluctant to say how much he has spent on the project. “Let’s just say, I don’t need a Jeep Cherokee, but I could have bought one with what I spent on this. Anyway, you see a lot more Cherokees around than these.”
People with less money and more space than classic car collectors have been discovering old farm tractors in recent years, and magazines like Farm Collector (www.farmcollector.com) are available to help slake their thirst. A number of restoration services, like Kuhn’s (www.antiquetractorsrus.com) in Oxford, N.Y., are ready to turn a rusted barn discovery into a working showpiece.
Bob Kuhn, the owner of Kuhn’s, said a fully restored Farmall 450 dating from the mid-1950s would sell for about $15,000, but that the same tractor in good condition would carry a pre-restoration price of about $3,000.
Mount Pleasant Iowa 