Ed Kemmick
At the Montana Agri-Trade Exposition, size does matter.
Between the MATE show (which is redundant but which is what everybody calls it) and the Home and Health Expo, spread out over two large buildings at MetraPark, there were supposedly more than 500 booths.
This was the 38th annual MATE show, a Christmas-in-February extravaganza that brings thousands of farm and ranch families from all over the region to Billings during this slow season.
You could buy tools, hoses, drill bits, butcher knives, tires, seeds, fertilizer, caps, hoodies, jackets, meat, barbecue sauce, jewelry, fancy purses, cookware and “Tomboy Tools” with pink handles. You could even buy something called “Parker’s Hangover Tonic,” a drink mix with the winning slogan, “When you feel dead, it’ll clear your head.”
But what absolutely everyone had to see were the monster pieces of farm equipment, the sticker-shock behemoths that gave young boys a thrill and old ranchers the willies.
The biggest of them all was a John Deere S680 combine with a price tag of $468,678. The side panels on the combine were propped open to give people a peek into the belly of the beast, where there was a bewildering variety of levers, drive belts, hoses and electrical boxes.
The combine was so big that one of the open panels looked something like an awning on an RV, and clusters of people would just stand there in its shadow for a few minutes talking and basking in the bigness of the machine.
I don’t know who had more fun making the long climb up to sit in the cab of the equipment on display, the ranchers and farmers themselves or their young children. Why, if I had a dollar for every tyke in a cowboy hat who had his picture taken in the cushy cab of a tractor or combine over the three days of the MATE show…
Closest to the John Deere combine, in terms of price and size, was a Case Quadtrac, which looked like a cross between a tractor and a futuristic tank. I might have bought it myself but damn the luck, it had a “Sold” sign on the cab window.
A Case rep told me it had actually been sold, for $450,000, just before the exposition and was headed to a ranch near Forsyth. One fellow stood beneath the leviathan and said to the rep, in mock disappointment, “We want a big one.”
All the giant equipment makes you wonder: Who’s going to work on farms and ranches in the future? One advertising sign made the connection clear. Next to a photo showing an array of post pounders, some priced as high as $11,800, were the words: “Doesn’t take breaks or call in sick. Your new fencing crew.”
True, but what about the economies of those small towns that used to depend on the people working on farms and ranches? A “crew” of post pounders might not call in sick, but neither are they going to be buying much tobacco and whiskey, or food and clothing.
But I’m no farmer or rancher, if you couldn’t tell. I didn’t know what most of the stuff on display was, and in many cases even the names — action rake, super slicer, disc ripper and hydraulic calf table — didn’t do much to clear things up.
At least I was wearing jeans and a ball cap, so I mostly fit in. I would estimate that 95 percent of the people in those two buildings were wearing jeans, and if the Hutterites wore jeans the percentage might have crept up to 98. In all that crowd I saw exactly one person wearing a suit and tie. If my eavesdropping impressions were correct, he was trying to sell life insurance to one of the booth operators.
Speaking of which, what did people working the booths at trade shows used to do before the advent of smart phones? I swear, unless they were engaged with a customer, every one of them was bent over a phone. I saw a couple of old boys stabbing out one-finger text messages, and it’s OK for me to mention this because I am one of that tribe.
My lack of familiarity with agricultural practices allowed me to savor a couple of advertising slogans that probably wouldn’t have given a moment’s pause to an experienced farmer. One said, “Conception. Calving Ease. Carcass. Cows.” Another read, “Castrate. De-horn. Dock Tails. Treat Prolapses.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if these products, whatever they were, also cured hangovers.
