50 series early vs late.

[Big Bud guy]

39 minutes ago, acem said:

I think the total 50 series production was less than 1586 production.

Farming was really bad back then. Dad was close to bankrupt. Our neighbors that didn't go bankrupt were close to it.

 

Even so 15,000 is 15,000.  IMO, you have to get less then 500 to qualify as rare like the 4156 or the 3488 hydro.  I know everybody likes to talk about how bad things were in the 50s but there sure was a lot of JD 50 series tractors, 20 series combines, and IH 14 series combines around here.  

[dale560]

13 minutes ago, Big Bud guy said:

Even so 15,000 is 15,000.  IMO, you have to get less then 500 to qualify as rare like the 4156 or the 3488 hydro.  I know everybody likes to talk about how bad things were in the 50s but there sure was a lot of JD 50 series tractors, 20 series combines, and IH 14 series combines around here.  

Yes some farmers were doing pretty well in the 80s. Depended if you were heavily in debt or doing okay. Lots of the same machines around here. 83 model 4450s, 88 series tractors and combines of all flavors.

[Big Bud guy]

23 hours ago, dale560 said:

Yes some farmers were doing pretty well in the 80s. Depended if you were heavily in debt or doing okay. Lots of the same machines around here. 83 model 4450s, 88 series tractors and combines of all flavors.

Just speaking for ourselves, we only had one piece of farm machinery financed at the time and it was the 4640 which was bought in 80'.  No operating loans and 2 land loans.  Admittedly, dad had to dip into the farm savings account a few times to make the payment on one of the land loans and he lost a little sleep over that.  

[IHhogfarmer]

Why would have the cabs on the 5x88’s been prewired at factory for radios but only a dealer installation? I realize farmers didn't really care about that stuff and it cut costs but by 1981 I would have thought with more creature comforts they would have just been standard. 

[FarmerFixEmUp]

1 hour ago, acem said:

 

Why was the brake wear indicator removed?

Why did they go back to open center hydraulics on the 3488 and 3688?

Thanks for posting!

 

I had a 1983 3688 a number of years. It had  brake indicators and closed center hydraulics. I think all 3688 had the closed center hydraulics, maybe 3088 and 3288 didn't? 

I remember when the 3x88's came out, our salesman was telling the customers they didn't have TA's. He got a little upset at me when I said they were basically 886 and 986 tractors with new sheet metal. 

[FarmerFixEmUp]

33 minutes ago, Big Bud guy said:

Even so 15,000 is 15,000.  IMO, you have to get less then 500 to qualify as rare like the 4156 or the 3488 hydro.  I know everybody likes to talk about how bad things were in the 50s but there sure was a lot of JD 50 series tractors, 20 series combines, and IH 14 series combines around here.  

Not here, livestock guys here didn't buy hardly anything in those years. Only tractor my dad ever bought new was a 560 gas. Almost everything was pre owned. 

[brahamfireman]

2 hours ago, Drysleeves said:

Same light is in the Magnum for the same purpose. More or less copied from Deere.

You mean from Case. Factory installed on case cabs since the 70's.

[SDman]

I'll guess I'll be the odd guy and say that I saw LOTS of 50 series IHs back when they were new. Unfortunately, just about every one I ever saw was on an IH dealer's lot. Here in SD, it seemed like just about every IH dealer was loaded to the gills with 50 series and other new IH equipment as well in the early/mid 1980s. Seems like all IH dealers at that time around here all had about the same inventory that consisted of a mix of the following products:

• anywhere from 2 to 4 new 50 series tractors(mostly a mix of 5088s and 5288s with an odd 5488 here or there). I remember mostly 2wd models, but later on the MFD models became more numerous.
• probably one 30 series tractor, either a 3688 or a 3488 Hydro if you were in an area that Hydros were popular
• probably one 60 series 2+2 tractor, usually a 6588
• probably an 84 series utility tractor as well, usually a 5/6/784 model
• an Axial-Flow combine, usually a 1440 or 1460
• an Early Riser/Cyclo planter
• a set of grain drills, usually a double or triple set of 6200 press drills
• probably a couple 496 tandem discs and a couple 5500 chisel plows

Now for the kicker....you could probably come back a year or two later and pretty much still see the same exact inventory at the same dealership. They might have sold a tractor or two, and maybe a couple pieces of planting or tillage equipment in a year's time, but mostly that inventory was carried over....sometimes over a period of 2 or 3 years depending on a lot of factors. I've said this before on here, and I'll say it again.....I would bet that more IH 50 series tractors celebrated their first birthday while sitting on a dealer's lot than in either a farmer's yard or in his machinery shed. 50 series were just poor sellers in a poor ag economy around here. 

Some of the reasons for 50 series tractors selling poorly around here were:

• Many 86 series tractors were sold around here in 1978-80 or so. Most were still low-houred, so nobody was in a hurry to replace them.
• Hard to finance new equipment when the interest rate is closer to 20% than 10%.
• Low commodity prices due to overproduction/grain embargo.
• The PIK program in 1983 took a lot of acres out of production to try to reduce the grain surplus. Nobody was wearing out machinery as much when you were using it less over fewer acres.

While it was neat for me as a 12-14 boy to see all that new red equipment at dealer's lots and the state fair and other ag events, to those people with a financial stake in all that new equipment probably spent many a sleepless night worrying about all that same, new machinery they drove by every day on their way to work.

 

Here is a bulletin about some changes made to the 50 series tractors that is dated June of 1984. If you look at the handwritten notes that contain the serial #s, it looks like IH was down to producing less than 1000 50 & 5288s per year and only about 7-800 5488s per year in 1984. The Farmall plant was probably down to a crawl when IH sold the ag line in November of 1984.

[acem]

The 70s were good times for farming here. Good weather and prices. Many new tractors,  combines and equipment were bought during the 70s round here. 

The early 80s were horrible here. The drought in 1980 was devastating. Most crops were a complete failure. It didn't matter what the price is if you have nothing to sell.

Our limited irrigation at the time was overwhelmed. We abandoned most of our rice to save a little. Our other crops were a complete loss. We baled our dieing rice to feed as hay. Most of our ponds dried up. There was no crop insurance like today. Instead the USDA offered 'low interest' loans. Dad used them to pay off his debts.  No new tractors,  combines, etc were bought round here in the early 80s.

The market was flooded with good used equipment. A neighbor bought a new 1460 in 85. It was an unsold 84 or 83 model. There was plenty of equipment on all the dealers lots. Most of our dealers went bankrupt in the 80s, even the green ones.

I remember a salesman offering dad an amazing deal on an 88 series tractor after the merger. It didn't matter. We had to much debt already. 

Dad bought a 1066 at a neighbors bankruptcy auction in 83 for $3500. Could have bought the nicer white 2-135 and white combine for less but dad wanted the 1066. Still got it.

 

[jimw]

 I agree to always having a radio in the cab thing .  I don’t think a lot of u understand how poor or conservative those old farmers were. Pretty much all big and appear to doing well farmers would have a big field tractor and an older loader tractor. Some young farmers who broke with dirty thirties dads were ridiculed for expanding and then probably loosing the farm. Poor mangers they were called. moms uncle farmed till he died in 84 with a D case . New paint was a waste of money. Try getting him to pay extra for a radio. 

[jimw]

 Guess I sound like a downer. But lots of hrs listening to thirties farmers. They pushed these experiences on their kids and this affected how they lived. Really was a time when it was hard to tell the well off from the not so well off. I really like the 50 series and finally got a chance to own one about 2014

[Matt Kirsch]

Almost 27000 Super MTAs produced and they're considered rare. Just ask any auctioneer.

[Matt Kirsch]

8 hours ago, Big Bud guy said:

Even so 15,000 is 15,000.  IMO, you have to get less then 500 to qualify as rare like the 4156 or the 3488 hydro.  I know everybody likes to talk about how bad things were in the 50s but there sure was a lot of JD 50 series tractors, 20 series combines, and IH 14 series combines around here.  

Ok that's what you consider rare. I think that's a little extreme.

Think you meant the 80's, not the 50's. The only "50 series" Deere was selling in the 50's was the 50. The 50 series Deeres were also made from 83 to 89, mostly AFTER the crisis of the early 80s.

The early 80's weren't as hard on the rich grain farmers out in the Midwest. I don't recall if there was government assistance at the time, I think there was some, but when you're farming thousands of acres, the check from one of those programs is enough for a family of four to live on for a year. When you're only farming 110 acres, the check is enough for a nice dinner out with the wife at Ponderosa. You could even spring for an actual steak and not just the buffet.

[mrfred54]

5-88's around here are not so rare. I know of at least 9 of them  with in  a 10 mile area from me. Rare around here would be the 50 series deer, only know of one. Our dealership, don't know exact number, sold about a dozen of the 5x88's. We had two different customers that bought two at a time. One of them bought two 5088's and the other bought a 5288 and a 5488 mfd. After i did pre delivery service on these tractors I also delivered them. Should also note that there were trade in on deals

[SDman]

Trust me, there were plenty of large, broadacre farms that went under in the 1980s, too. They got caught up in the "get big as fast as you can" mentality of the 1970s as well, only to have it all come crashing down on them in the 1980s.

You guys in the Corn Belt and dairy areas referred to Harvestore silos as "blue tombstones" when the farm they were located at went broke; out here the same could be said about Big Bud tractors in the 1980s. A lot of those guys got caught up in the "try to keep up with your neighbor" philosophy....Big Buds were a status symbol in the late 1970s-early 1980s.

The only things that I would say sold well around here in the 1980s were 4wd tractors and chisel plows. When the government "idled" or "set aside" all those acres to reduce grain production, around here those acres just got blended in to everyone's normal summer fallow rotation. Like most government programs, I thought the set aside program was counterproductive since all those idled acres would get planted to winter wheat in the fall and produce a bumper crop the next year....I don't think wheat production was reduced at all during the 1980s in my area.

As far as radios not being factory-installed, did the 86 series tractors have factory-installed radios? I can remember fondly going to our IH dealer to see Dad's new 1086 in the dealer shop in 1978....and the dealer and his son were installing the radio at the time. One reason that radios may not have been factory-installed was theft. Even the push-button AM radios at that time were probably still somewhat of a novelty...I know our IH dealer had radios get stolen out of trade-in tractors while sitting on the lot. I can remember when the 51/5200 series Maxxums were new in the early 1990s, CaseIH had problems will several hundred radios getting stolen from those tractors at the port in Baltimore, where they were unloaded off the ship from Europe. After that, they quit installing radios for them at the plant and became a dealer-installed accessory.

One other thing not mentioned on late 50 series IH production....the IH badges on the black stripe around the rear part of the cab were removed from production at the very end.

[Big Bud guy]

2 hours ago, Matt Kirsch said:

Ok that's what you consider rare. I think that's a little extreme.

Think you meant the 80's, not the 50's. The only "50 series" Deere was selling in the 50's was the 50. The 50 series Deeres were also made from 83 to 89, mostly AFTER the crisis of the early 80s.

The early 80's weren't as hard on the rich grain farmers out in the Midwest. I don't recall if there was government assistance at the time, I think there was some, but when you're farming thousands of acres, the check from one of those programs is enough for a family of four to live on for a year. When you're only farming 110 acres, the check is enough for a nice dinner out with the wife at Ponderosa. You could even spring for an actual steak and not just the buffet.

I meant the 80s but my point still stands.  My JD dealer doubled their sales in 1980 and again in 1981.  One of those years they sold over 20 new combines and sold all the trade ins too.  50 series 4x4s made a decent showing.  Most of these IH rotaries were 80s combines.  Massey 850/60 didn’t come out until 1980 and there was a boatload of those around.  And what hurt my dealer and all the other dealers around here in the 80s was drought and CRP.  

You can google up a 5X88 for sale  and you can buy as many as you want.   That’s not rare. If 15,000 was the benchmark then a whole bunch of common tractors would be “rare”.  My IH 1256 would fall into that category.  I don’t even consider close to being rare.  

[766 Man]

  IH's poor financial condition following the 1979 strike greatly limited the money it had to offer financing.  JD was selling far more tractors during the first half of the 1980's than IH but the numbers were far below those of the late 1970's.  There were a number of 50 series JD's that got sold around here but certainly not on the par of the 40 series.  This area in pockets had vegetable growers, orchards, and vineyards that were not bothered by the grain embargo or the government cutting subsidies on milk production.  Out of the groups just mentioned some did also raise grain or milk cows but were more of a sideline than a main source of income.  So they were not bothered as bad as a straight up grain or dairy farm.  But the farm crisis did not resolve itself in short order.  Everybody in agribusiness kept saying it would get better until late 1983.  Then came closures of agribusinesses in mass.  Farm Credit decided that they were not extending any more lifelines and cozy'd up to the lawyers and auctioneers.  By 1985 corn was as low as 1.55 dollars per bushel on the CBOT so I don't know who was making gobs of cash.  For most farmers it was all about survival.  Yes, if you were at a point in your business cycle where you got your mortgage paid off by 1980 you could handle the down turn better.  Even then some of those guys resorted to government programs designed to idle acreage for a few years to pay the taxes and buy for the household.  Around here it took until the year 2000 for those dark clouds to fully lift.  By the way look at serial number assignments for the JD 4240 versus the JD 4050 to get an idea as to how far tractors sales had fallen during the 1980's.

[Qc.Can.IH man]

10 hours ago, IHhogfarmer said:

Why would have the cabs on the 5x88’s been prewired at factory for radios but only a dealer installation? I realize farmers didn't really care about that stuff and it cut costs but by 1981 I would have thought with more creature comforts they would have just been standard. 

It may also have been to prevent radio theft. I see that @SDman mentioned that in his post also.

I know a couple of dealers in my area that would get the radios stolen out of the tractors while sitting in the yard. 

 

 

[Qc.Can.IH man]

23 hours ago, IHC5488 said:

I had an early 88 tractor with this setup.  There was no metal overhang or strip there. The western foam never lasted.  We made the strip, welded it in place and the side interior foam never looked better. 

Why IH thought that would hold up in the farm world, I have no idea.  But they did fix it.

My 30 series tractors are missing that strip, my 3288 serial number 639 and the cab serial number is 13639 (it’s a coincidence the last three cab numbers are the same as the tractors serial number)  The 3688 serial number is 786 and the cab serial number is 13920. When I restored my 3688 I installed that strip to protect the foam. 

[Qc.Can.IH man]

12 hours ago, acem said:

A few observations.

That sounds like the interior shown in the  super 70 brochure. Never herd them called "boomerang" panels before.

JD style console light is a good idea.

I wonder what the shifter valve changes were.

Why was the brake wear indicator removed?

Why did they go back to open center hydraulics on the 3488 and 3688?

Thanks for posting!

 

They didn’t go back to the open centre hydraulics, it was planned but then the merger happened…

 The reason they were going back to open centre was because they were having too many issues with the closed centre pumps.

All of the 86 series were supposed to be updated with a new filter bypass screen, but that never happened because of the merger.

 The problem with the original screen for the closed centre hydraulics was when the tractor’s hydraulic oil was cold there was a heat activated valve that would be open and it would allow unfiltered oil into the pump, those pumps hated contaminated oil!

 My fix for that was to install a 5/8” nut to hold that valve closed all the time. 

[Drysleeves]

10 hours ago, brahamfireman said:

You mean from Case. Factory installed on case cabs since the 70's.

Deere 30 Series 1972

[russtred]

12 hours ago, IHhogfarmer said:

Why would have the cabs on the 5x88’s been prewired at factory for radios but only a dealer installation? I realize farmers didn't really care about that stuff and it cut costs but by 1981 I would have thought with more creature comforts they would have just been standard. 

Probably not the only reason but dad said when he worked at the dealership in the 70's tractors would come in on RR flatcars and windows would get broken out and radios stolen somewhere along the line.

[acem]

There were no 50 series jd, 88 series IH or other row crop tractors sold in the early 80s here. Lots of 30 are 40 series jd,  66 and 86 series IH, etc. 

I'm glad it was better in other areas. If it as bad everywhere as it was  here all the ag companies would have gone bankrupt.

They did sell some hay equipment in the early 80s. But the buyers were mostly small ranchers with off farm income.

Thx-Ace 

[oldtanker]

The downturn in the farm markets and intrest rates saw me re-up in the Army. The original plan was for me to spend a few years in the Army thne dad and I would go see the banker about expanding the farm. All of a sudden the interst rates were at 19-20% and crop prices were down. Dad wasn't going to to risk the farm under those conditions. Many of the "old" family farms went belly up here including ones owned by family friends. One I went to highschool with told his dad when we graduatred that they were either getting some new equipment or he was leaving the farm. So they wound up with a JD 4400 bine and a JD 4320. By 1980 that farm was long gone. But right before the crash my dad had told me there would be no problem with expanding. Said every time he saw the banker the guy was offering to lend him money for just about anything. So I became a career soldier and dad retired from farming in 83 when his healt went south. Now out west of us in the Valley (Red River west MN/east ND) most of the big guns out there did just fine.

Rick

[hillman]

2 hours ago, acem said:

 

I'm glad it was better in other areas. If it as bad everywhere as it was  here all the ag companies would have gone bankrupt.

other than JD every manufacturer was effected by bankruptcy, buyouts,mergers etc

 

 

 

 

 There were dealerships closing all over. I am not aware of an area not effected by the 80s. It was the worst economic event in my lifetime and people my age had no opportunities starting out of school.  I tend to think those who say it wasn't bad were not born or were children. IMHO it was a nightmare