By Ryan C. Christiansen

At the farm sale, you try not to look too interested, but you dream about what it would be like to have that old Allis Chalmers, John Deere, or Caterpillar tractor in your possession. Perhaps you plan to restore it, or you need it for parts for a working tractor. Or maybe you just want to park it along the drive as a lawn ornament to welcome friends and relatives. Whatever your motivation, you don’t say much about it to the other men in Carhartt jackets and boots. You have your hopes up, but then she shows up, The Tractor Lady, Karla Ziegler, and you know you’re going to pay too much for that old tractor, or you’re not going to get it at all.

A registered nurse with three grown children and five grandchildren, Ziegler works in an operating room, but she grew up on a farm. Her dad, Bob Ziegler, and his brothers ran Ziegler Construction out of Georgetown, Minn., and she helped to build roads and dig ditches, too. She still has the 1927 Caterpillar 60 that her uncle and grandpa used to build roads and she fondly recalls the work.

“I got to drive some of the bigger stuff to and from the job,” Ziegler said, “and on the job site, I had a little Caterpillar D4. That was mine, but I also drove the packer and stuff like that to help to make the roads more solid.”

Now married to Greg Pederson, who grew up around Allis-Chalmers-brand farm equipment, Ziegler and her husband spend their free time restoring old tractors, which means spending a lot of time hunting them down at auctions. “We kind of have an idea about what we want to pay for them and we go from there,” Ziegler said. “We pretty much stay with Caterpillar, John Deere, and Allis Chalmers, but we have some others that suit our fancy.” Ziegler has taken a liking to B.F. Avery-brand equipment, she said, “because they are little and catch my eye,” she said.

Ziegler has purchased a number of tractors online through eBay, but she attends farm sales, too, where she turns a lot of heads. “People at auction sales are shocked to see a woman bidding on tractors,” she said. “I went to an auction sale with my sister-in-law and I bid on a tractor there. A lot of gentlemen came up to me afterward to talk. I guess I’m just different, [but] I’m part of the group now,” she said, “and they have an idea about what I might be interested in. They go, ‘Oh, no, she’s here. I’m not going to get that tractor,’ and I’m thinking the same thing.”

The hardest part about finding tractors, she said, “is deciding how much I’m willing to pay for them, or how far I want to go to purchase one.” Ziegler has driven as far as Portland, Ore., she said, to pick up a B-series Lindeman crawler tractor, which is a converted John Deere B, now restored. She has also purchased tractors and had them shipped to her from California, she said, “sight unseen,” except for photos and descriptions

Ziegler said she got her start restoring tractors in the late 1990s when her father-in-law, Carl Pederson, gave her husband the Allis Chalmers WD that he bought new in 1948. “It was pretty much trashed,” Ziegler said, “and I told my husband that it was too important of a tractor to leave it parked like it was, and that we had to restore it.”

Before they tackled the WD, however, Karla said they purchased a “tiny” Allis Chalmers B. “That was our practice one,” she said, “and it took us all summer, because we didn’t have any idea what we were doing. My father-in-law said that tractor should have been up-and-running in two or three weeks!”

Ziegler said that next summer they restored the WD, “and it was just so rewarding,” she said, “to see him climb on that tractor and be able to drive it. He was six-foot-one and maybe 130 pounds at the time, just a skinny little guy, and he was so proud.”

After that, restoring tractors became an obsession, Ziegler said, “and so we had to do the John Deere B that was my dad’s, handed down from my grandma. I cultivated corn with that one.”

Their fathers have since passed on, but Ziegler and her husband continue to restore family tractors. “Right now we’re doing my husband’s uncle’s Allis-Chalmers,” she said.

It keeps her busy year-round, she said, both at home and at the lake, where her brother, Stan, her brother-in-law, Jesse Martinez, and her nephew, Hawken Erickson, all help out.

Ziegler makes the restoration process sound simple: “You just start taking it apart,” she said. “The bolts go in a bucket and all of the pieces get set aside. Depending on how rusted the bolts are, you might have to cut them off and pound them out.”

They sandblast the parts with their own sandblasting equipment, Ziegler said, using pulverized glass from a recycling plant in West Fargo. “We’re a green operation,” she quipped. Sandblasting may be the hardest part, “because it’s time-consuming,” she said, “because you’re taking everything off to the bare metal. That’s the bottom of the line.” They usually do their sandblasting on the weekends, she said, “because it takes so much time.”

Painting begins with a rust-proofing prime coat, followed by the paint color. Ziegler said she puts on a coat of paint while the tractor is in pieces, and “my husband gets mad at me,” she said, “because I put too much paint on some things. I’ve learned to be careful not to get some on threads and stuff like that.”

When it comes time to put the tractor back together, “we kind of know what goes where and what doesn’t,” Ziegler said. “When we have it pretty much put back together, we paint it again, and when it’s complete, we put a clear coat protectant on it.” In all, they apply four or five layers of paint.

As for finding parts, “So far, we’ve been lucky,” Ziegler said, because they’ve been able to find most of them at Biewer’s Tractor Salvage in Barnesville, Minn., or at Pete’s Tractor Salvage in Anamoose, N.D. Ziegler said she’s found many parts on eBay, and sometimes she can get parts from new tractor dealers. “You just have to start looking,” she said.

Ziegler has restored perhaps a dozen tractors so far, but to say she has a few more left to restore would be an understatement. “We have over 100,” she said, but there are some she doesn’t intend to restore, including two Allis-Chalmers D-series tractors and a few John Deere. “They have too much character as they are,” Ziegler said. “They are working tractors and I don’t want to take that away from them.”

With an army of tractors at her fingertips, “We’ve stopped going to so many auctions,” Ziegler said, “because there’s not a whole lot that I’m looking for.” However, that doesn’t stop her from looking. “I enjoy the hunt,” she said. “We’ll look on eBay to see if there is anything that strikes our fancy, and my husband will mention one to me. That’s enough.”

As long as she can continue to do the work, she said, The Tractor Lady will be restoring tractors. “I love tractors,” Ziegler said. “I like to take them from nothing and restore them to what they were. My husband and I prefer them basically trashed, and then we build them back up. That way, we know what’s in them and what condition they’re in.”

And so what’s the best part about restoring an old tractor? “When we put gas in it and actually drive it,” Ziegler said-a joyful moment, but bittersweet-because “the hardest part is when I’m done,” she said.