To me a tractor is "antique" if it's a product of the industrial age.
Once you get into the 60's and 70's, you're into the age of technology. It's not a hard and fast line - it's just that that's when everything started getting complicated.
I think what makes "antique" tractors collectable and interesting is their relative simplicity, and their unmistakable ruggedness, before designed obsolescence caught on.
I'm not sure too many people are going to be passionate enough about collecting and restoring machinery from our era to call it a popular hobby, even 100 years into the future.
I think they've hit a level of complexity that takes all the fun out of working on them.
There's so much plastic on them, it takes the art and beauty out of them.
There's so much advanced engineering that it takes all the quirky "technique" out of using them.
Gone are the days of unique sounds - smoke in your face - grinding big unsynchronized gears, and pulling big levers.
Old tractors have a sense of danger around them, you have to know what you're doing on one. They were much more hands on - you worked one. Nowadays you drive one much like a golf cart. What year golf cart doesn't really matter - they're all pretty much the same.
New tractors are too vanilla to establish any kind of nostalgic memory of them.
Just like I don't think my old 1982 Plymouth TC3 will ever be on a collector's calendar (rightfully so in my mind)- neither will the Kabota's, the Mahindra's or even the John Deeres of today.
They're efficient devices now - which is great. But they lack all the style and character of the "antiques".
Style and character don't put food on the table, so it's a natural progression, and a good one - but to me - THAT is what makes the old ones "old".
That era of tractors will, I believe, follow the hobby.
So the definition of antique isn't really a sliding window - it won't always be "anything more than 30 years" - but instead what most collectors call "antique" will be stretched older and older as time requires, always applying to the same tractors of that industrial era.
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Today's Featured Article - Fire in the Field A hay fire is no laughing matter-well, maybe one was! And a good life-lesson, too. Following World War II many farm boys returned home both older and wiser. One such man was my employer the summer I was sixteen. He was a farmer by birth and a farmer by choice, and like many returning soldiers, he was our silent hero: without medals or decorations, but with a certain ability to survive. It was on his farm that I learned to use the combination hand clutch and brake on a John D
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