What happened to important names in the ag equipment industry such as DMI and New Idea? Here is a look at four companies that once made products for agriculture but aren’t well-known today.

Some of this information comes from literature once distributed by the companies to promote their products. Other information was tracked down via the internet. Click through the slideshow to see photos of these items.

• DMI products. DMI Inc. made many products, including grain wagons and chisel plows. Perhaps one of its best-known pieces of equipment, common not that long ago, was the Tiger-Two tillage tool, a deep ripper for minimum tillage. A brochure promoting the product says it “puts the ‘prrr’ in your profit” and “would eliminate compaction and increase yields with your 2-wd tractor.” DMI used slogans like “designed and manufactured with ingenuity” and “DMI … making quality affordable.”

Bill Dietrich, a Goodfield, Ill., farmer, started the company in 1961 making hog crates, waterers and some fertilizer equipment. Case IH purchased the company several years ago. Case IH is now part of CNH.  

• New Idea haying machines. Yes, those are horses pulling hay tools on the front page of the New Idea haying machines brochure. In other photos in the brochure, a tractor pulls a wagon and hay loader. That’s loose hay — not even small square bales. It’s going way back!

Note the New Idea triangle logo, too. This is before AVCO bought New Idea in the mid-1900s. Later, Agco bought the company. It shuttered the Coldwater, Ohio, plant and quit selling new equipment under the New Idea name. Besides hay equipment, the company is famous for corn pickers, manure spreaders and the Uni-Harvester machine.

• Grove Economy Wagon gears. Never heard of it? How about Manitowoc Cranes? Here is the story: John Groves and his brothers began building farm wagons in Shady Grove, Pa., and formed Grove Manufacturing Co. in 1947. Although they specialized in wagon bodies and running gears in the early days, they later offered wagon unloaders, hydraulic dump wagons, tilt-top trailers, farm elevators, mobile cranes and more. In fact, John Groves invented the first crude hydraulic crane for use in the factory, and later marketed it.

Walter Kidde Co. bought Grove Mfg. in 1967, against John Groves’ wishes. He later formed a different company, and amassed some 60 patents before he died.

The Grove name is still alive today. The company is a world-leading manufacturer of mobile industrial cranes, with operations in Shady Grove and Germany. The company makes and sells Manitowoc Crane products.   

• The Gates Rubber Co. This company issued the Farm Implement Belt Guide in 1950, containing detailed parts numbers for belts for machines made by about 85 companies in the farm equipment business, from Massey-Harris to the Fox River Co. Charles Gates Sr. purchased the Colorado Tire and Leather Co. in 1911. In 1917, his brother John developed a rubber belt that became the model for the serpentine belt.

After many buyouts and name changes, Gates Corp. still operates today, and is the world’s largest producer of V-belts, according to internet sources.

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