The Moccasin Telegraph is in overdrive this month, as I've talked to a remarkable number of folks across Montana. Mostly farmers, which is something I now realize I'd come to miss, when we were mostly out of ag for a few years there. In this case, though, in another week or three I suspect I'll have talked to a very high percentage of the farmers out there with nice older 4WD tractors that are now in surplus status for the owners. This is due to quite possibly my most effective ad ever.

Advertising has always struck me as something approaching black magic. Hard data is, umm... hard to come by. I recently saw mention once again that there's a certain threshold you have to get over, otherwise you're basically wasting your money. Unfortunately for most businesses this threshold has always appeared pretty high to me, and I dunno, man...

Seems to me if you go about it right, publicity should all but take care of itself. Take for example the ecotourism project in the works with the Madison Valley Ranchlands Group. Tours will be led via a non-profit arm of the group, with the (presumably significant) profits going straight back to the landowners who participate. This is a concrete way to make wildlife a paying asset, even or perhaps particularly in a non-consumptive manner. Several significant conservation groups are involved in the Wildlife Committee, along with yours truly, and their members are likely prospects for tour participants. I have no doubt publicity will be free and extensive, and that sure beats writing the big checks, IMO.

But then hey, it's still possible to achieve near-total penetration of a market in the Trader's Dispatch, at least if you're looking for tractors. Alas, they have no website, or I'd link it, but it's a free monthly ag publication that contains basically every item of machinery for sale in Montana, and is read by an overwhelming percentage of the folks with interest in such matters. Between the dealer ads, auction listings, and individual buy/sell ads, it pretty well covers the spectrum.

Based on ads in last month's Dispatch I'd made a tour of the Hi-Line in late March, and looked at six tractors in the (formerly) Golden Triangle, from Great Falls to Cut Bank to Havre. A couple of those were at farm auctions, which are an interesting social situation that I'm sure doctoral theses could be written about. Although, there was a bitter north wind screaming at about 40 mph at an auction I attended north of Rudyard. It was brutal, but things went kind of high anyway.

Wheat's near $5/bushel, you know, and hope springs eternal. When you start talking about $400/ton fertilizer and $3 diesel, though, folks get a little somber, and aren't as quick to dismiss organic farming as prior. Not only that, there's keen interest in camelina, and who knows...? I remember when wheat was $6 in 1972, though, and fuel was $.35/gallon, and so I have a hard time viewing $5 wheat as exciting. Organic wheat at $15, now we're talking...

I also came away empty-handed from an auction in Conrad, although not from a social standpoint. That's where I grew up and went to school, and it was grand fun to visit with a bunch of people I hadn't seen in a long time. I exercised restraint and didn't milk the fact I'd already been in the field for too many laughs. It's true, though, I may have set a record of some sort when I plowed a field on March 24! It was certainly a personal record, and reinforced that perhaps we should upgrade equipment from the sixties to say, at least the seventies or eighties. "Newer" machinery does a lot better job, not to mention quicker! I don't have time for going round in circles endlessly anymore. In this case, though, it was a field with an outstanding carpet of cheatgrass and fanweed that I really should have plowed last fall, but was thwarted by winter's early appearance. Lucky thing I finally nailed it when I did, though, as it's been too wet again since (not to complain!).

I decided it was time to expand my search, and ran a classified in the Gazette last week, plus had this one coming out in the Dispatch. The phone has rang steadily since, to the point I need to enter the possibilities into a spreadsheet in order to keep them straight. Maybe I'm easily entertained, but this is almost too much fun! I'm talking with a lot of interesting people, and will be getting ahold of some of them again whether I buy their tractor or not. This already may have resulted in yet more (quite) limited access to big mule deer, and in fact the whole process reminds me a bit of big game hunting. It's big iron hunting, anyway, and I've had to refresh my memory, and straight-up learn things about tractors that I somehow got through the eighties without knowing. We had a Versatile tractor, and so I never really studied the pros & cons of other makes, but I'm getting up to speed. Versatile still looks good. They're easy to work on (as these things go) and that 855 Cummins engine was kind of a pinnacle, in some ways. For that matter, the tractors themselves were, and they were selling hundreds a year of them from the late 70's into the early 80's, but by '86 it was over. The few remaining big machinery manufacturers have been through numerous mergers since, and if you walk into a dealership and buy a new 4WD tractor, you're going to walk out most of $200,000 lighter! Obviously that's not going to happen with the Rockpile Ranch.

Fortunately, my vast selection of possibilities from back in the day gives me unprecedented, near-intoxicating bargaining power. Why can't buying a car be like this?!

So I trust my search will prove successful, and I'll find a reliable puller for a bargain price. Part of the deal with the cheapskate plan is you may have to work on things, though, and anymore you don't just take it to the dealer for repairs or you can easily spend more than the tractor is worth! That's why Jon Tester changed the clutch in his Versatile recently. That's right, Montana's freshman US Senator spent part of the Easter recess replacing a tractor clutch on their organic farm by Big Sandy. Based on the comments posted on this Billings Gazette article, that just drives the neo-cons into a frenzy. A US Senator doing his own mechanical work is preposterous, you know, and the fact he milked it for a photo op just puts them over the edge! And sure, the article is sort of a "big, sloppy kiss" but the Bozeman Daily Comical gave Montana's Speaker of the House Scott Sales one of those last Sunday, with a front-page fluff piece promoting him as a bi-partisan, hands-off legislative leader. That's blatant falsehood, in my experience, but apparently I was the only one sufficiently upset to call the Publisher and Managing Editor and complain. Since the Comical doesn't allow comments on their website, it was my only recourse... As Ed Kemmick noted, the Chronicle's website is "shockingly primitive and all but useless", and since their archived articles are available only by paying extra, I can't link to their Sales department and might not anyway.

Perhaps based on some of the Gazette comments in the Tester article, Kemmick also wrote a tongue-in-cheek cut & paste form for commenters to use. It would appear to be a big time saver, and covers most of the usual points, although Ed's spelling is suspiciously good.

Getting back to machinery, though, I've been picking my friend Ed Mitch's brain about moving big iron. He was an implement dealer, among other things, and says it's "not a job for sissy's & you want good help with you." I think those criteria apply to changing a tractor clutch also, and personally I'm impressed our US Senator can tackle a job like that. I really doubt there's anyone else in Congress, or even our State legislature similarly capable. For that matter, I'd have been hesitant myself, but at least now I've pondered the fact that you can change out a Versatile clutch without dismantling the whole tractor, unlike say, a John Deere which has to be literally broken in half.

Some will say being a grease monkey is no qualification for high office, but the ability to fix things has benefits that carry over into other areas. That's part of what I enjoy so much about talking with farmers. By and large, they have a quiet confidence that they can deal with whatever comes up, because, well, they have to. The Salt of the Earth and all, and hey, there's the phone again...