"That was way back in 1968," Braswell recalls today. "One of the first things I learned was that mowing often leads to landscaping. And landscaping creates even more opportunity."What''s the greatest market change in last concretescarifierattachment three decades?Braswell found even more business in tree care. His local company soon became Southern Tree & Landscape. It began, he recalls, with "nine employees in a small office trailer," and later grew to several hundred in multiple locations."New customers would often contact us to maintain concretescarifierattachment their yards," Braswell explains, but "then they''d decide to do some landscaping and tree-planting. We became experts at both.""The biggest market change," Braswell emphasizes, "is that even people who love to do yard work decide to have someone else to do their maintenance. This opens all sorts of new markets."

"Also, a dealer who sells large mowers and tractors probably already does business with a finance source like Wells Fargo or Sheffield. With finance opportunities in place -- plus single products that serve multiple fields -- he''s in a position to enter concretescarifierattachment several industrial markets." What kind of guarantee comes with this?" I asked, suspiciously eyeing the few drops of oil on the pavement under the rear axle of an old gray Ford tractor."Well, none, actually," replied the man who had it sitting out by the road with a for-sale sign. "What you see is what you get--where is, as is."The tractor in question was a 1946 Ford 2N (see photo, Page 103). The four-cylinder engine had been overhauled a few years earlier, he said. Then an old Pennsylvania-Dutchman, who probably bought it new when Truman was president, traded it in on a new Kubota.

Even if the price had been higher, we probably would have bought it. I''m a sucker for old gray tractors. My late grandfather had an old Ford he used to clip pastures with a clattering sickle bar. My 78-year-old father, Don, still uses an old gray tractor to plow snow and mow at his place in Delaware, Ohio. It''s a Ferguson T0-30 made in 1951--the year I was born. I learned at 10 to drive on that tractor, under Dad''s close supervision, of course.Dad got the tractor in 1956, not long after he bought 15 acres just west of Delaware and put up one of the first pole barns in the area. "I took it on a trade, sight unseen, as credit on a down payment on a piece of real estate," he recalls. "The buyer was $1,100 short. He offered me the tractor with a two-bottom plow, rear manure scoop and concretescarifierattachment a two-row cultivator.

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