Cultivating Collectors

“Do you have a tractor with a PTO or a remote satellite? Because . . . it looks like I might have to take her paddles off,” said Larry Lindgren to the grower sitting across from him munching on a mushroom omelet.

It may sound as if he was speaking in military code, but Lindgren was asking about an old part on an even older machine.

Lindgren and the other 10 men in jeans and cowboy boots who sat around a breakfast table at the Wayside Cafe were doing what they usually do Fridays at 7 a.m.: talking about their antique farm equipment.

What part needs to be acquired to make a rusted relic work? Who bought what from whom for what price? Which precious prize has just surfaced in the word-of-mouth equipment market that could be acquired by someone in the group?

They are a specialized bunch, an aging subsection of Ventura’s local growers, with mechanical minds, an eye for rusted metal and the passion to get up early and talk about it. They also regularly haul their treasures to county fairs, festivals or each other’s houses to be preserved, poked, polished or repaired.

As part of the breakfast ritual in Camarillo, mushroom grower Jon Peterson brings the fresh-picked morsels from his farm to stir into omelets. Fellow farmers have brought beans and other goodies.

One recent Friday, the gathering of growers seemed like a bunch of young boys trading baseball cards.

One man brought Peterson a yellowed and tattered 1950s operator’s manual for an International 350 utility tractor to keep with his tractor. Another brought small pictures of branding irons hanging on a wall, tractor seats all lined up and single-cylinder engines. Someone else came with a 2000 calendar called “Workhorses of Yesteryear,” filled with images of tractors and other farm equipment.

But Lindgren had come that morning with a very specific conundrum: The machine he was using to put mulch on his orange trees wouldn’t spread the fertilizer under the trees. It just dropped it behind the machine.

Lindgren wanted to figure out how to jury-rig the machine to spray the chopped up plant material and to propel itself at the same time. His question about the PTO, or power takeoff, referred to an engine-driven shaft that supplies power to mechanical implements behind the tractor. In this case, the implements are paddles that are part of the spraying mechanism.

“Are you trying to do it mechanically or hydraulically?” asked LeRoy Miller, who wore striped suspenders. Miller’s credit card includes a large picture of him, grinning ear to ear, next to a sparkling red tractor.

These men are part of a larger tri-county organization called Topa-Topa Flywheelers. Created in 1993, the group has about 80 members and is dedicated to showcasing old farm equipment.

Peterson, who has 35 tractors, said collecting classic machinery is like hunting. “The thrill is the chase, finding a certain model and make, getting it under your ownership and bragging about what you got,” he said. “Then it’s all downhill from there.”

Collecting farm equipment has been popular for years in the Midwest, but in California the phenomenon is relatively recent, said Michael Miller, president of Topa-Topa Flywheelers. The organization takes its name from a nearby mountain range and an engine component.

In California, growers are not retiring in large numbers any more and the machinery used is different from that needed to harvest the staple crops of the Midwest, such as soy beans, wheat and corn.

Not coincidentally, as equipment becomes more high-tech, with air-conditioned cabs and computer-operated engines, growers get more interested in collecting the old-fashioned kind, he said.

“When a grower is running a piece of equipment, he ends up talking to it,” said Bill Milligan, a third-generation farmer in Ventura County. “You spend 12 hours a day on it; after a while, it becomes a personal friend.”

He said the sentiment about collecting equipment comes largely from nostalgia. “When you read the classifieds, you might see something like, ‘Looking for John Deere, belonged to my father, would like to find it and restore it,’ ” he said.

“For a lot of these guys, their grandfather had it or their fathers took them on the tractor. We didn’t have any air-conditioned cabs, we sat in the heat and the cold and just took the dirt,” he said.

But aside from these collector’s items, tractors and their brethren are becoming increasingly scarce, according to Don Crawford, manager of a Ford dealership in Fillmore that sells farm equipment to growers in the county.

“Farmers are using less and less equipment all the time,” Crawford said. “Take citrus, for instance. They don’t run tractors through the ranch as they used to. Now they have machines that sprinkle and spray,” he said.

Besides the weekly breakfasts, club members relish the opportunity to take their tractors to festivals and show them to the public.

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At a recent Fillmore Rail Festival, the Topa-Topa Flywheelers had nearly 30 gleaming tractors proudly displayed near an expanse of grass. Each tractor at some point had an eager young child perched in its seat.

“This brings it home to them. They are one step closer to understanding how agriculture works,” said citrus grower Lindgren. “That is what we want to accomplish--sharing a little bit of history and how Ventura used to be.”