In the late 1970’s, while I was only a few years old, my father worked on a North Central Wisconsin Potato Farm. This is where my first memories started, along with my fascination with farm equipment. I still vaguely remember going to visit my father in the field during the long hours he was working during harvest, and riding the tractor with him.

Here is a 1977 picture of the John Deere 4020 and 4-row John Deere 416 potato planter my father used to drive.

Wysocki Farms is still going strong these days, and is one of the largest vegetable growers in the state. Here they are in April of 2005 planting with three CIH MX210s and three Harriston 8-row potato planters.

In the very early 1980’s, we left the Central Sands of Wisconsin and moved to the Northwest part of the state, near Chetek. My father became the manager of large farm in the area, primarily growing corn and soybeans. Most of the fields where we lived were either run by my father’s operation, or by Nuto Potato Farms. My father and the West Family (Nuto’s) had a good relationship, and would often swap fields for better crop rotations. We lived right in the center of where some of Nuto’s main fields in the area where. So, I was abled to watch them in fascination many times over the years, planting and harvesting potatoes.

Nuto’s Farms are also still alive and well. Here is a picture of them in May 2003 planting some of their approximately 900 acres of potatoes with two John Deere 7810s and two Kverneland 4-row potato planters.

While growing up 1/64^th was my scale of choice for farms toys, although I also played with my 1/16^th ones often. I remember daydreaming many times while playing, about how great it would be to have toy potato equipment. When I hit my teenage years, my fascination with farm equipment took a “back seat”, while my interests in modern fighter aircraft grew. I started building model aircraft, and put the farm toys on a shelf.

It wasn’t until 1998, after I got out of the Air Force, and started to work part-time for a farm that my interests quickly and strongly regressed back to farm equipment. In 1999 I started building and customizing 1/64^th farm toys, because, what I wanted, and how I wanted things to look, was not offered by the toy manufacturers. With all the years of aircraft model building in my past, I seem to quickly catch on to the modeling of farm equipment. Shortly after taking on this obsession, I realized that I wanted my main goal to be building models of potato equipment, since I so very much wanted this stuff when I was younger. The two problems with this are, one, there are many other fascinating pieces of farm machinery out there, and two, potato equipment is very specialized, so it would take a lot of research to do things right.