For Robert Lefever, antique tractors are a sort of consolation prize. “When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a farmer, but that didn’t work out as a possibility,” Robert says. “It was a rough and tumble business, and pretty expensive and difficult to get into it.”
Instead, he settled for watching the engineers at one of the oldest tractor shows in the country, the Pennsylvania Farm Show. Located near Harrisburg, the show marks its 102nd year in 2018.
That sufficed when he was young, and in the long run, he says, it probably worked out for the best. After working in a family petroleum business for years, he bought a 33-acre farm where he can house his unique tractors and produce sheet metal fenders and hoods for antique tractors.
Robert bought his first tractor, a 1929 McCormick-Deering 10-20, in 1964. “At that time, it was socially unacceptable to buy old junk like tractors, but I was interested in it, so I bought it as a toy to play with, at a time when they were cheap,” he says. “After a few years, collecting tractors got bigger.” Noticing a shortage of sheet metal parts for tractors, he began producing them commercially.
As the popularity of antique tractors picked up speed, Robert began collecting crawlers. “Again, years ago, those crawlers were cheap,” he says. “They were the undesirable tractors of the hobby, so nobody much bothered with them.”