The Farmall M with green paint

I was poking around on Tractor Zoom yesterday when this tractor made me do a double-take. My inner monologue was like, “Um, that’s a Farmall M… and it’s painted green. Why?”

Believe it or not, I ask myself this question a lot more than you’d expect. Sometimes owners do interesting things to their tractors — I’m sure they have perfectly good reasons, too. However, there’s rarely an explanation in the auctioneer’s description and oftentimes, that leaves me scratching my head.

I picked up the phone and called Troy Orr, the auctioneer selling this tractor, and asked him. Without missing a beat, he chuckled and replied, “Well, that’s what ya gotta do to improve the resale value on these red tractors, man. You’ve been doing this for long enough to know that green paint brings more at auction!”

I laughed out loud, and said, “Touché, Troy,” and we both had a good laugh at the joke!

He didn’t really know why this Farmall M was painted green, however, he did give me the contact information for Dennis Clark, the farmer who’s consigning it along with two other Farmalls: a sharp 450 and another M in its work clothes.

I picked up the phone and called him, determined to get to the bottom of this.

Green Farmall M - TZ Listing

Dennis Clark’s green Farmall M

I had a nice conversation with Dennis yesterday morning about his farming career and tractor pulling. He was a row crop farmer who raised cattle for most of his life, and retired from full-time farming about ten years ago, with his son running the operation ever since. He still gets a little seat time in the equipment, as he put it, “As soon as my son took over, I got demoted to rock-picker! I still get to play with tractors, though, so that’s good enough for me.”

After a few minutes of small-talk, I asked him about the green M.

He told me that when he retired, he started building and restoring tractors for fun. Over the years, he restored a nice 4020 Power Shift, a Farmall 450 (the one in this auction), and an Oliver 1555. He also built this green Farmall M for local antique tractor pulls.

It wasn’t always green

“The M had been on our farm since about 1975,” Dennis told me. “I picked it up at a dealership [in Jamestown, North Dakota], and put it right to work feeding cattle. At the time, I didn’t have a mixer wagon. So, I pulled the hopper off of an old combine, put some running gear under it, and made my own feeder wagon. That tractor was perfectly-sized for it, too — we fed 180 head of cattle with that setup for years until we upgraded. After that, however, the M didn’t do an awful lot. When I retired, I decided to turn it into a pulling tractor and a tractor-ride tractor.”

Dennis took a C264 gas engine from a Farmall 400 and built it up a little bit with an M&W High-Altitude piston kit. This gave him a little more power and displacement — I believe the bigger pistons and skinnier sleeves upped the displacement to 281 cubic inches. I’m fairly sure he told me that he replaced the carb with something a little hotter, too. At any rate, when he bolted it into the frame, it dyno’d at 65 hp on the PTO shaft. Pretty good numbers for a hot-rod Farmall M!

The “Hold my beer” moment

For most of his career, the majority of Dennis Clark’s farm equipment was green — save for the Farmall M and an IH 915 combine. However, one of his neighbors just down the road was a die-hard red guy. Well, he stopped by one day while Dennis was working on the M, and as it usually does, the red/green rivalry came up. So he decided to have a little fun with the neighbor, and casually mentioned that he was going to paint it John Deere green.

Well, to hear Dennis tell it, the neighbor’s reaction didn’t disappoint.

“He looked at me, jaw on the floor of my shop, and said, ‘Bullsh*t. You’d never paint that tractor green.’”

Dennis grinned and said, “You just wait!”

A few weeks later, Dennis’s hot-rod Farmall M rolled out of the shop with a snazzy new coat of green paint with yellow accents in all the right places.

“Hold my beer” moments are fun, aren’t they?

Since then

Since the day he finally rolled it out of the shop, Dennis’s green Farmall M tends to draw a bit of a crowd. It has placed in the top five for Best Appearing Tractor at a KFYR tractor drive in the area at least once. It’s also no slouch on the pulling track — Dennis has a handful of first and second-place trophies from the pulling days. He told me that on a hard-packed pulling track, it’s very competitive (I suspect in the ~5,000-pound classes). On a dry, loose track, it struggles because it doesn’t have enough rear-end weight and it breaks the tires loose.

As with all good things, the tractor ride and pulling days are behind him. At age 80, Dennis wants to slow down a bit. He told me, “Y’know, it’s getting harder to climb up on the tractor, and I need to start getting rid of some of my stuff anyway. It’s time for somebody else to have some fun with it.”

The tractor runs and drives very well, and I think it could go back to work if the new owner wanted it to. It has an M&W hand clutch kit for live PTO, which is always handy. (For instance, if you were to go feed cattle with it the way Dennis did for so many years.) It also has fresh Firestones all the way around.

Wrapping up

I asked Dennis who the perfect buyer for this tractor was, in his opinion. Without hesitating, he said, “I just want to know that whoever buys this tractor plans on taking care of it and continuing to enjoy it like I did.” In a perfect world, I think he’d like them to keep the green paint, too, but he knows that at the end of the day, he has no control over any of that — and that’s fine by him.

What’s it worth? Hard to tell. You can pay pretty much anything you want for a Farmall M — we’ve got records in our Tractor Zoom Pro database as low as a couple hundred bucks up to over $13,000. It seems like over the past year, the nicer ones with straight, clean sheet metal have been selling in the $3,000 to $4,000 neighborhood, so I would imagine that it should fall somewhere in that range.

I’ll say this: If you’re looking for an M and you don’t get too hung up on the green paint, this would be a heck of a runner for whatever the price turns out to be! It’ll be interesting to see what this tractor sells for when the bidding wraps up on June 11, that’s for sure!

One last thing

When we were on the phone, I told Dennis that he wasn’t the only one to have ever done this. Tom Harmon, a tractor puller from North Branch, Michigan, campaigned an IH 966 called Preparation H II on the NTPA Grand National Pro Stock circuit for years in the 1990s. Actually, he had several different paint schemes involving green paint on that tractor — and they were all very well-done. The Harmon family doesn’t own it anymore, and it’s been returned to a more traditional red paint scheme as a Super Farm.

The Preparation H name still lives on, though.

Anyway, make it a great week, folks! Go find some Interesting Iron of your own!

Green Farmall M - TZ Listing

Farmall tractors for sale

Hi! I’m Ryan, and I love tractors. It doesn't matter if it’s a showpiece, an oddball, or seen its share of life ... if it’s unique and it’s listed by one of our auctioneer partners at Tractor Zoom, I’m going to show it off a little bit! This equipment is all up for auction RIGHT NOW, so you can bid on it. I think it’s cool, and I hope you will too! This is Interesting Iron!