Tractor restoration projects keep past alive on Oklahoma farm 

Joe Peeper gets a gleam in his eye whenever he sees the distinctive color combination of flambeau red, desert sunset and battleship gray or the metal insignia of Old Abe, the American eagle mascot that embellished every Case tractor in the early days before the company merged with International Harvester. 

“These original tractors are neat because they’re history. They’ll never make them again,” he said recently on his farm northwest of Enid, Oklahoma. 

His brother Tom, a retired weed scientist at Oklahoma State University, collects old Case tractors too. 

“It’s a fun hobby, and you meet a lot of nice people,” Tom said by phone from his home in Stillwater. “It provides a common interest. Nowadays, when so many things divide us, sometimes we have to find things that connect us.” 

Family tradition

Growing up at Apache, their dad owned the local Case dealership, buying and selling tractors and often using trade-ins to farm their own ground. 

Back then, there were four implement dealerships in town, and farmers developed an affinity for certain makes and models. 

One of Joe’s prized relics from that era is the last model L to come off the Case assembly line in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1940. Only after he took possession of it from a widow near Red Rock—a deal ten years in the making—did he identify the serial number and recognize its significance. 

Another tractor that’s special to him is the 1962 Case model 830, called a Western Special, which he is now fixing up with his grandson, Zander, a Drummond FFA member. Zander hopes to enter it in Oklahoma Youth Expo’s tractor restoration competition in March. 

Together the two went up to Coldwater, Kansas, to retrieve it from a retired farm couple and drove away pleased with their find. 

“The 830 line is pretty rare,” Joe said. “We were happy when it started right up.” 

Fixing up an old tractor is a time-consuming project and can easily cost $1,000 or more, with parts and expertise increasingly hard to come by. 

“There’s only one man left in the country I’m aware of who makes the old dashes with the authentic gauges and instruments, and he’s from Vineland, New Jersey,” Joe said. 

But preserving antique tractors is a worthwhile pursuit to enthusiasts who see it as a way to reconnect younger, more urban generations with the country’s rural heritage. 

Tractor shows remain as popular as ever and seem to draw an increasingly diverse audience, Tom observed. 

Prior to Joe and his wife, Mary Jo, moving to the Enid area to farm with her father Clarence Miller in 1977, they lived in Missouri near his twin brother, Jim. 

Jim started a Case tractor club, the Missouri Screaming Eagles, which has members from around the country. 

Joe and Tom also support Oklahoma’s Steam Threshing and Gas Engine Show, which is always held the first weekend of May in Pawnee. 

Joe has more time to spend tinkering with tractors since he retired as a certified wheat seed dealer in 2021. That year the two-term past president of the Oklahoma Crop Improvement Association was able to sell his wheat for $10.50 a bushel over the scale and made the decision to step away from the demanding work involved in running a seed business. 

Up until then, the Peepers raised and sold up to 60,000 bushels of high-quality seed wheat annually, which required walking every field at least once and sometimes twice a season to remove rye stalks by hand. 

“You might only find a few plants, but the only way to get it out was to walk every acre,” Joe said. 

In spite of the enormous time commitment, he and his family enjoyed the work. 

“You get satisfaction from providing a good quality product that contributes something good for society,” he said. 

Living history

Wheat genetic improvement has become increasingly sophisticated over the years, but Joe and Tom can recall the early days of wheat breeding in Oklahoma, when one of the state’s most popular and enduring wheat lines, Triumph, began as an on-farm breeding experiment conducted by a very unusual man, Joseph Danne. 

Danne had only an eighth-grade education, but he developed an intense interest in crop and livestock breeding that became his life’s focus. 

Tom was fortunate to meet the reclusive genius sometime in the mid-1950s when he was a boy around the age of 10. 

He was with his dad when they stopped by Danne’s farm south of El Reno to reserve seed for the following year. When they arrived, Danne was in a field behind a team of horses pulling a harrow. He walked over to the edge of the field to meet them and agreed to give them three bushels of seed if they would leave a few gunny sacks on the porch of his house. 

“It was the only time in my childhood where I saw anyone farming with horses,” Tom recalled. “I remember being amazed by how big they were and how patiently they stood.” 

It would take two years to grow out and multiply that seed before it could be sold to other farmers. But the seed was in high demand. At the time, most wheat was being grown on the same land year after year, leaving it prone to diseases and pests. 

In addition, no commercial fungicides were available then, which drove the need for hardy, rust resistant wheat. 

“My dad held Mr. Danne in very high esteem,” Tom recalled. “He was one of my dad’s true heroes, the most highly respected wheat breeder in the world at that time, as far as I knew.” 

When Danne passed away in 1959, he left his genetic material and research notes to Oklahoma State University. The program’s ancestral heir, Triumph 64, is still familiar to most wheat geneticists and pathologists today as the source of a stacked array of stem rust resistance genes, including one in particular that continues to be used for breeding purposes, according to OSU’s chief wheat geneticist Brett Carver. 

Early Triumph, which came out in the 1940s, was grown for many years all across the country, proving Danne accomplished what he set out to do starting way back in the 1920s—improve the existing Turkey Red and Blackhull wheats by selecting plants that were earlier maturing, hardier and more productive. 

“His legacy lives on,” Carver said. 

Even so, in the early days OSU’s wheat breeding program encountered setbacks that demonstrated just how difficult variety development can be. Tom recounted one example, the much-heralded variety Concho, released to great fanfare in 1955. Developed during extreme drought years, upon its release conditions turned wet, resulting in tall unruly plants that all fell over, he said. 

Prior to the mid-1970s, Joe remembers walking through fields as tall as his armpits before semi-dwarf varieties were introduced, which made the straw easier to manage. 

At first, OSU offered just one or two varieties. By the time Joe retired, there were more than 15 to choose from, with unique characteristics to fit a wide range of different challenges and goals. 

The acceleration of improved lines has largely been due to farmer investment in public wheat breeding through a voluntary check-off collected on every bushel of wheat sold. Certified seed also incurs a royalty that goes back into supporting further research and development. 

Looking to the future

Enhanced investment benefits everyone involved in the wheat industry, Joe said, but it does point to one of the biggest challenges facing agriculture, which is rising production costs and the necessity to take on more debt and greater financial risk. 

When he started selling seed in the late 1980s, wheat sold for $2.50 to $3.50 a bushel, and he added another dollar to cover the extra costs of cleaning and storing it. Now, seed wheat in the area sells for $15 a bushel, and market prices are highly variable. 

“When I was starting out, the price didn’t change more than 25 or 50 cents in a year,” he recalled. “Now the market can change 50 cents in a day. And back then we were farming with fewer inputs.” 

Even with higher wheat yields, farming for a living is still a tough road. Joe has watched the number of commercial farms in his neighborhood dwindle, replaced by hobby farms and ranchettes. But he believes the key to success in agriculture remains the same as it’s always been—hard work, attention to detail and commitment to producing a quality product. 

For his part, Zander, who lives at the neighboring farmstead with Joe’s daughter, Christie, is optimistic about the future. 

“I think there’s lots of opportunities to do whatever I want to do,” he said. 

Historic Case tractors are sure to be a part of it. 

Though Joe’s son Danny now farms the home place with modern John Deere equipment, Zander remains “100% committed” to making sure the old Case brand is showcased and admired for many years to come.