The Day He Chose This Massey Ferguson… It Ran Fine Until It Mattered Most

March 14th, 1983. Roger Lindstöm was 41 years old. He stood in the equipment yard of a Massie Ferguson dealer outside Oaklair, Wisconsin, looking at a 1978 Massie Ferguson Len5 with 1,847 hours on the meter. The tractor had belonged to a farmer 20 mi south who’d passed suddenly over winter. The widow needed it gone. The price was $18,500.

Roger had $6,000 saved and could finance the rest at 13.8% over 5 years. He walked around the machine twice, checked the oil, opened the hydraulic reservoir. Everything looked maintained. The dealer said the previous owner had been meticulous. Roger made the decision standing there in light snow. He signed the papers that afternoon.

He didn’t know then that 14 years later, during the wetest spring Wisconsin had seen in 30 years, that tractor would leave him standing in a field at dawn with a wrench in his hand and a planting window closing. If you value stories about farming decisions and the years it takes to understand them, you’re welcome here.

This channel exists to remember how equipment, weather, and time shape the course of a farm. Subscribe if that matters to you. Roger Lindstöm grew up on 240 acres his grandfather cleared in the 1920s. His father ran dairy until 1967, then switched to corn and soybeans when milk prices made it impossible to keep going.

Roger took over in 1974 at 32 after his father’s heart gave out during second cutting. The farm came with a paidoff Massie Ferguson 135, a disc, a plow, and a 16 ft grain drill. Roger farmed that way for nine years, small, manageable, quiet. By 1983, Roger had been married to Linda for 12 years.

They had two daughters, 8 and 10. Linda worked part-time at the county clerk’s office in town. Her paycheck covered groceries, and the monthly payment on the pickup. Roger’s farm income covered land taxes, fuel, seed, and repairs. Some years there was money left, some years there wasn’t. The Massie Ferguson 135 was 30 years old by then.

It started every morning and handled the tillage work, but it didn’t have the power to pull a larger planter or run a chisel plow through heavy residue. Roger had been renting an additional 80 acres from a neighbor since 1981. The extra ground helped, but working it with undersized equipment stretched every job into long days.

He knew he needed a bigger tractor. He just hadn’t planned on needing it in March. That winter, the 135’s clutch started slipping under load. A rebuild would cost $1,400 and take two weeks. Roger couldn’t afford to be without a tractor during spring work, and he couldn’t afford to buy new. The dealer in Oaklair called him in early March about the estate tractor.

The 1105 had 70 horsepower, a three-point hitch, and a reputation for lasting. Roger had seen them run on neighboring farms for years without trouble. He test drove it on a county road behind the dealership. It shifted smooth, didn’t smoke, and the hydraulics responded without hesitation. The price was fair for a 5-year-old machine.

Roger made the decision because it was the decision he could afford to make. He brought it home on a Sunday. His daughters stood in the driveway and watched him back it off the trailer. Linda came out to the shed while he was greasing the fittings. She asked if he was sure about the payments. Roger said he was.

She didn’t argue. That was how they worked. The monthly payment was $287. It didn’t sound like much when the dealer explained it, but Roger knew what it meant. It meant every month for 5 years before seed, before fuel, before anything else, $287 had to be there. He’d farmed long enough to know that some months the money came easy and some months it didn’t come at all.

The payment didn’t care which kind of month it was. Spring of 1983 came late and cold. Roger started fieldwork the second week of April, pulling a disc across the corn ground. The 1105 handled it without strain. He finished tillillage by April 28th and started planting corn on May 2nd. The weather held.

He planted all 320 acres in 6 days. The tractor ran 12-hour days and never hesitated. By midMay, the corn was up. Roger felt the decision had been sound. That first summer, he learned the machine’s rhythms. It burned fuel predictably, about 6 gallons an hour under load. The oil stayed clean between changes. The air filter needed changing every 40 hours in dusty conditions, but that was expected.

The seat was worn, but comfortable enough for long days. The steering was tight. The brakes were firm. Roger came to trust it the way you trust something that does what it’s supposed to do without asking for attention. Harvest that year went well. Corn came off at 142 bushels per acre, soybeans at 38. Prices weren’t strong, but they were enough.

Roger made his payments and had money left for seed the next spring. Linda’s hours at the clerk’s office increased to full-time that fall. The daughters started bringing home report cards that went on the refrigerator. Life moved forward in the way it does when nothing dramatic happens. By 1985, the Len 105 had 2400 hours on it.

Roger had replaced the battery once and the alternator once. He kept up with oil changes every 100 hours and greased it after every use. The tractor had become part of the operation’s routine. spring tillillage, planting, some light fall work, pulling a wagon during harvest, snow removal in winter. It wasn’t the newest machine in the county, but it wasn’t the oldest either.

It occupied the middle ground where most farmers live. In 1986, Roger’s neighbor to the east asked if he wanted to rent another 40 acres. The man was 73 and tired of keeping up with it. Roger said yes. That brought the total to 360 acres. The 115 handled it without complaint. Roger bought a used six row planter that spring and finished planning in 5 days.

He felt the operation was reaching a scale that made sense. Large enough to generate income, small enough to manage a loan. Linda’s father passed that summer after a short illness. She inherited $8,000. They talked about what to do with it. Roger suggested paying down the tractor loan. Linda agreed.

By October 1987, the Massie Ferguson 1105 was paid off. Roger had owned it for 4 and a2 years. It had 3,100 hours on the meter. Everything still worked. He felt he’d made the right choice. The next seven years were steady. Corn prices stayed low but stable, hovering between 220s and 250s a bushel.

Soybean prices moved up slightly in 1989, then settled back. Roger planted, sprayed, harvested. The tractor required a hydraulic hose replacement in 1988, a new starter in 1990, and a fuel pump in 1992. These were expected repairs, the kind of maintenance any machine requires as it ages. The costs were manageable. The machine kept running.

Roger’s daughters graduated high school in 1991 and 1993. Both went to college. The older one studied nursing in Madison. The younger went to a state school up near Superior for education. Linda worked full-time and managed the household budget with the kind of attention that kept things from falling apart. Roger farmed.

The operation sustained itself but didn’t grow. The 1105 became a fixture, less a piece of equipment and more a fact of the farm’s existence, like the barn or the driveway. By 1995, the tractor had 4,800 hours. It burned more oil than it used to, about a quart every 20 hours instead of every 50. The clutch was softer when engaging.

The paint was sunfaded and rust was starting along the hood seams where the finish had chipped away. Roger repainted it one weekend in November. Red, not the original factory color, but close enough. He told Linda it was easier than letting it rot. She said it looked good. The daughters came home for Thanksgiving and took a picture of him standing next to it in the driveway.

He kept that picture in the shop, tack tacked to a board near the workbench. Winter of 1996 was mild. Snow came late and didn’t stay long. By early March, the frost was out of the ground. Spring came early that year, the kind of early that makes farmers nervous because it means decisions have to be made sooner than planned.

Roger started tillage the first week of April and had the ground worked by April 20th. The soil conditions were good. He planned to start planting corn on April 24th. The forecast looked clear for 10 days. Everything was aligned. On the morning of April 23rd, Roger went out to the shed to grease the planter and check the seed boxes. The 11:05 was parked where he always left it, facing the door with the bucket loader detached and sitting along the wall.

He climbed into the seat, turned the key, and the engine turned over but didn’t fire. He tried again. Same result. The starter cranked strong. The battery was good, but the engine wouldn’t catch. He checked the fuel gauge. The tank was 3/4 full. He checked the battery connections. They were tight. He tried starting it again.

The engine cranked and cranked, but wouldn’t fire. Roger spent two hours that morning troubleshooting. He pulled the air filter. It was clean. He checked the fuel line for blockages. Nothing. He cracked the injector lines to see if fuel was reaching the pump. It wasn’t. The fuel shut off solenoid wasn’t engaging.

He tested the electrical connection at the solenoid. No voltage. He traced the wiring back toward the ignition switch following the harness along the frame. Somewhere in that system, there was a break or a short. The tractor was electrically sound enough to crank the starter, but not sound enough to power the fuel system. Without fuel reaching the injectors, the engine was just turning over empty.

Roger called the dealer in Oaklair. The service manager said they could send a technician out, but it would be 2 days before anyone was available. The technician would need to trace the entire harness to find the fault. If it required replacement parts, that could take another week, depending on what was in stock.

Roger asked if there was a faster option. The service manager said he could tow it in and they’d prioritize it, but the outcome would be the same. Diagnostics, parts, time. Roger thanked him and hung up. He stood in the shed with the phone in his hand. The planter was ready. The seed was loaded in boxes he’d filled the day before.

The field was worked and waiting. The weather was perfect. The tractor wouldn’t start. Roger called a neighbor who farmed 480 acres 2 miles west. The man had a newer tractor, a machine less than 5 years old, and said Roger could borrow it, but he needed it back by the weekend for his own planting.

Roger thanked him and said he’d figure something out. He didn’t want to borrow equipment and risk delaying someone else’s season. He called another farmer he knew from the co-op. That man’s equipment was already committed. Roger made four more calls. Everyone was either planting or about to start. No one had time or equipment to spare.

It was the nature of farming. Everyone needed the same things at the same time. On April 24th, Roger had the 1105 towed to Oaklair on a flatbed. The dealer’s shop was backed up with three other machines. A combine with a bad feeder house, a disc with bent blades, and a hay balor that had thrown a belt. They said they’d get to the tractor as soon as they could. Roger asked how long.

They said maybe a week. Roger drove home in Linda’s car and sat at the kitchen table. Linda asked what he was going to do. He said he didn’t know yet. The weather forecast still showed clear skies, high pressure sitting over the region, no rain expected for at least 10 days. Every neighboring farm was planting.

Roger could hear tractors running in distant fields at night when he stood outside. The sound carried across the open ground. He spent the next day cleaning equipment he’d already cleaned and checking things that didn’t need checking. He organized the shop. He swept the floor. He did anything that kept him busy.

He called the dealer on April 26th. They said they’d found the problem. A corroded junction box behind the instrument panel. Water had gotten in somehow, probably years ago, and the corrosion had finally reached a point where the connection failed. The part needed to be ordered from a regional distributor.

It would arrive in four to six business days. Roger asked if there was any way to bypass it temporarily. The technician said not safely. The wiring harness was integrated into multiple systems. A temporary fix could create more problems, including potential fire risk. Roger said he understood. He hung up and walked out to the empty shed.

The planner sat there, hooked to nothing. By April 30th, the skies were still clear, but wouldn’t stay that way much longer. The forecast showed a weather system moving in from the northwest. Rain expected by May 4th, possibly heavy. Roger called the dealer again. The part had arrived that morning. They were installing it that afternoon.

The tractor would be ready by closing time. Roger drove to Oaklair, paid the $680 repair bill, and arranged to tow the 11:05 home. He got back at 6:00 p.m. The sun was still up but sinking. He unhooked the tractor from the trailer, hooked up the planter, filled the diesel tank from the farm’s fuel barrel, and started planting at 6:45.

He planted until midnight. The field lights on the tractor weren’t strong, but they were enough. He shut down at 12:15 a.m. cleaned the planter. Linda was still awake. She asked how much he’d gotten done. He said about 60 acres. She asked how much was left. He said 260. She didn’t say anything else. Roger started again at 5:30 the next morning.

The dew was still heavy on the ground, but the soil was dry enough to work. He ran the tractor 16 hours on May 1st, stopping only to refill the planter and the fuel tank. He planted 14 hours on May 2nd, 12 hours on May 3rd. The weather held, the skies stayed clear, but the soil was starting to dry out in the upper layer, and the forecast rain was getting closer.

By the evening of May 3rd, he had 220 acres planted. He still had 140 acres to go. The rain started before dawn on May 4th. It wasn’t heavy at first, just a steady drizzle that soaked in without running off, but it didn’t stop. It rained all day on the fourth and all day on the fifth. By the morning of the sixth, there were puddles standing in the low areas of the field.

The fields were too wet to enter. Roger sat in the house and watched the forecast on the television. The weather system had stalled. More rain was expected through the week. The rain finally broke on May 6th, but the ground stayed soft. Roger walked out to the field on the 7th and pushed a boot heel into the soil. It sank 2 in.

The ground was workable, but not ideal. He waited another day. On May 8th, he went back in. The soil was damp, but not muddy. He started planting the remaining 140 acres. He finished on May 11th, 17 days after he’d originally planned to start. The corn came up uneven. The early planted acres, the ones that went in before the rain, emerged strong and uniform.

The rows were straight, the spacing consistent, the plants healthy. But the late planted acres struggled. Germination was spotty in the low areas where water had pulled and stayed. Some seeds rotted. Others came up weak. By midJune, it was clear the late acres were 10 days behind in development. The plants were shorter, the leaf color lighter.

Roger sprayed and cultivated and did what he could, but the difference was visible from the road. Summer of 1997 was hot and dry. The early corn handled it well. The root systems were deep enough by the time the heat came. The lake corn suffered. The plants tassled under stress. Pollination was incomplete in some areas. By late July, Roger knew the yield would be down on those acres.

There was nothing left to do but wait for harvest. Harvest came in late September. Roger started combining on the 22nd. The early planted corn yielded 151 bushels per acre. The late planted corn yielded 127 bushels per acre. The difference on 140 acres was 3,360 bushels. At $255 per bushel, that was $8,568 in lost revenue.

Roger did the math, sitting at the kitchen table in October with a pencil and a sheet of paper. The repair bill had been $680. The real cost was the timing. The real cost was 2 weeks. Linda asked him if he regretted buying the tractor. Roger said no. It had run fine for 14 years. One failure didn’t erase that.

She asked if he’d buy it again. He didn’t answer right away. He said, “Probably.” She left it alone. The 1105 ran for six more years after that spring. Roger replaced the clutch in 1999, a job that took a weekend and cost $1,100. He replaced the radiator in 2001 when a crack developed along the top tank. That was $450. He replaced the rear axle seals in 2003 when they started weeping oil onto the brake assemblies. Another $380.

Each repair took time and money, but each kept the tractor running. By 2003, it had 6,400 hours on the meter. The engine still had good compression. The hydraulics still lifted implements without hesitation. But Roger was 61 and the tractor was 25 years old. Neither one was getting younger or cheaper to maintain.

In November 2003, Roger saw an ad in the county paper for a farm retirement auction. A neighbor 3 mi north was selling out after 40 years. The equipment list included a 1995 Massie Ferguson with 2,100 hours. Newer, cleaner, half the age of Roger’s machine. Roger went to the auction on a Saturday morning. He didn’t bid. He stood in the back of the crowd and watched the newer tractor sell for $28,000.

He drove home and parked his 1105 in the shed. He thought about what $28,000 would mean in payments. He thought about what it would mean to start over with a loan at 61. He didn’t go to any more auctions. Linda retired from the clerk’s office in 2004 after 30 years. Her pension wasn’t large, but it was steady.

Roger kept farming but started renting out the furthest 80 acres to a younger farmer who’d been expanding his operation. That reduced Roger’s workload to 280 acres. The young farmer paid cash rent every March. It helped. In 2006, Roger had a stent put in after a routine checkup showed blockage.

The doctor told him to take it easy. Roger reduced his farmed acres to 200 and rented out the rest. In 2008, he rented out everything except 40 acres closest to the house, the original home place his grandfather had cleared. He kept the 1105 and worked the small plot with equipment that was older than his marriage.

One of his daughters became a nurse in Green Bay and married a man who worked for a paper mill. The other taught middle school in Ashland and had two children. Both visited on holidays. Neither wanted to farm. Roger didn’t ask them to. He understood that their lives had moved in different directions. Linda asked him once during Christmas of 2009 if he regretted not having a son.

Roger said no. He said farming was hard enough without putting that weight on someone who didn’t want to carry it. In 2011, Roger stopped farming entirely. He was 69. His back hurt in the mornings and his knees hurt by afternoon. The 1105 had 7,100 hours on it. He parked it in the shed and covered it with a canvas tarp.

He rented all 240 acres to the young farmer who’d been working the neighboring ground. The rent covered property taxes and a little more. Linda’s pension and social security covered the rest. They didn’t need much. Roger still went out to the shed some mornings. He’d pull the tarp back and check the tires, the fluids, the battery.

He started the tractor once a month to keep everything moving, let it run for 10 minutes, engage the hydraulics, cycle the clutch. The tractor still ran. It didn’t smoke. The clutch still engaged smoothly. It was simply no longer needed. In 2015, a man from Iowa called asking if Roger had any old Massie Ferguson equipment for sale. Someone at a machinery auction had given him Roger’s name. Roger said he had 115.

The man asked about condition and hours. Roger told him 7200 hours, runs good, needs paint. The man offered Ford $200. Roger said he’d think about it. He hung up and walked out to the shed. He stood there for a while looking at the tractor under the tarp. He called the man back 2 days later and said yes.

The buyer came up on a trailer the next week. He looked the tractor over, checked the engine, tested the hydraulics, paid in cash, and loaded it up. Roger watched it roll down the driveway on the back of a flatbed. Linda stood next to him on the porch. She asked if he was okay. He said he was. She went back inside.

Roger stayed outside a little longer. He watched until the trailer turned onto the county road and disappeared. The tractor had cost him $18,500 in 1983. He’d paid it off in 1987. He’d run it for 32 years. It had plowed, planted, and pulled for three decades. It had worked through drought and rain and every kind of weather.

It had failed him once for 11 days in the spring of 1997. Those 11 days had cost him a season’s margin. But 32 years of reliability couldn’t be dismissed because of two weeks. Roger thought about that sometimes in the years after. How a machine could serve you faithfully for decades and still the one time it failed could define what you remembered.

How you could trust something completely and still lose something. Because trust doesn’t stop weather or time or the narrow windows that farming demands. How the 1105 had been a good tractor, legitimately good, and that hadn’t been enough when it mattered most. He also thought about what would have happened if he’d bought new in 1983.

the payments would have been higher, maybe $450 a month instead of 287s. He might not have kept the farm through the lean years of the mid80s when corn dropped below $2 a bushel. He might have sold earlier or lost it to the bank. The 1105 had kept him farming. It had been affordable. It had been maintainable.

It just hadn’t been perfect when perfection was required. In 2017, Roger and Linda sold the farmhouse and moved into a smaller place in town, a ranch-style house with a onecar garage and a small yard. The land stayed rented. The young farmer was doing well with it, running modern equipment, and getting yields Roger never saw.

The shed on the farm stood empty, except for some old tools and a workbench. Roger drove past it sometimes on his way to the hardware store. The building looked smaller than he remembered. One of his daughters asked him once during a visit in 2018 if he missed it. He said some parts. She asked which parts.

He said the parts before things went wrong. She didn’t understand what he meant. And he didn’t explain further. There wasn’t a way to explain that farming wasn’t about the good years. It was about whether you could survive the years when one thing failed at the wrong time. Whether you had enough margin to absorb a loss. whether reliability over decades could make up for failure in a single moment.

Roger turned 80 in 2022. He still subscribed to the farm report that came in the mail every month. He still checked corn prices out of habit even though he hadn’t planted a seed in over a decade. He knew what the young farmer was getting per acre on the rented ground. Around 180 bushels for corn, 45 for beans. The yields were better now.

The equipment was better. Everything was more efficient. But Roger also knew that efficiency didn’t mean immunity. Somewhere on some farm, a tractor that had run perfectly for years would fail during a narrow planting window. Someone would lose time they couldn’t recover. The crop would suffer.

The year’s margin would disappear. And that farmer would have to decide whether the 15 years of reliability mattered more than the two weeks of failure. Roger thought they both mattered. He thought that was the part people didn’t talk about when they discussed equipment decisions. That you could make a sound decision, maintain it properly, do everything right, and still have it cost you when circumstances converged wrong.

That farming wasn’t about avoiding failure. It was about whether you could absorb it when it came, whether you had enough good years saved up to survive the bad ones. The Massie Ferguson 1105 had been a good tractor. It had been reliable, maintainable, and affordable. It had kept Roger farming for 32 years through good markets and bad, through dry seasons and wet.

It had cost him $18,500 in 1983 and sold for $4,200 in 2015. Over those 32 years, it had probably saved him $40,000 compared to buying new. And in the spring of 1997, during the wetest season Wisconsin had seen in 30 years, it had left him standing in a field with a wrench in his hand and a planting window closing. It had cost him $8,568 in lost yield that year.

Money he never recovered. Both things were true. Both things mattered. And neither one could be separated from the other. That was what Roger understood after all those years. that a machine could be both the right choice and the wrong choice depending on which day you asked. That reliability was real until the moment it wasn’t.

That farming required you to trust equipment completely while knowing that trust would eventually fail you. Roger didn’t talk about this much. Linda knew some of it, but not all. His daughters knew even less. They knew he’d farmed. They knew he’d sold the equipment. They didn’t know about the spring of 1997 or the 11 days or the way he’d stood in the shed that April morning and felt the weight of time he couldn’t control.

Sometimes when Roger drove past the old farm, he thought about the 1105. He wondered if it was still running somewhere in Iowa. He wondered if whoever bought it had trouble with it, or if it ran fine for them. He wondered if they knew about the corroded junction box or if it had been fixed well enough that it never failed again.

Mostly he just remembered it as it was. Red paint faded by sun, tires worn smooth in the centers, seat cracked along the seams. A machine that had done what he’d asked it to do for 32 years, except for two weeks in the spring of 1997. a tractor that had been exactly what he could afford in 1983 and exactly what he needed until the one time it wasn’t.

That was farming. That was equipment. That was the distance between reliability and failure, between trust and loss. And Roger Lindstöm, at 80 years old, sitting in a small house in town with corn prices he no longer needed to know, understood that the question was never whether the Massie Ferguson 1105 had been a good tractor.

The question was whether 32 years of good could outweigh two weeks of failure. And the answer he’d learned was that both were permanent. Both stayed with you. And you carried them forward together, inseparable for as long as you remembered.