The old gray tractors--the result of tiller a partnership that later dissolved into the separate Ford and Ferguson lines--revolutionized postwar farming. These classics have held up to time, held onto collectors'' hearts and held their value ever since.The roadside seller''s price was $1,795. That was about 2 1/2 times what the Ford cost new in 1946. But it was also about the going rate at the time. So even though the tractor was older than me or my wife, Melanie, we bought it on the spot after a test drive.That was in 1984, when we bought our land. We have used the old Ford almost continuously ever since. We never regretted the purchase. rake With a minimum of service and repairs--lots of grease, irregular oil changes, tiller some new wiring and radiator hoses--the 2N has never failed us. Equipped with a two-bottom plow, 5-foot rotary mower, disk harrow and scraper blade, it has done all we rake asked of it, everything from plowing snow off of our 600-foot driveway to mowing or tilling the better part of our 20 acres, year after year. And all for less than what most suburbanites spend these days on a riding lawn mower.

"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 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 tiller would often contact us to maintain 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 rake yard work decide to have someone else to do their maintenance. This opens all sorts of new markets."

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