ROCANVILLE, Sask. – Visitors to Betty and Allan Holland’s home don’t have to venture far inside before realizing what they do in their spare time.
Other than the kitchen and the bathroom, and perhaps the bedroom, the walls of this farmhouse are lined with shelves, many of them reaching from floor to ceiling. On those shelves sit rows of tidily parked little tractors.
“It’s just as good as putting your money in the bank,” Betty Holland says as she leads her visitor past a wall of green John Deere tractors and into a large living room where miniature tractors can be seen in all directions.
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There’s no reason to limit themselves to tractors. Every make of every implement used on the farm has been reproduced as a toy. But Holland said they had to draw the line somewhere.
“There’s so much to collect and where do you start? Because of the money and the space, you specialize into something. And we specialized into tractors.”
She estimates they own between 500 and 600 tractors, a collection accumulated over 13 years.
But the Holland house is not just a shrine to the workhorse of the modern farm. It is also the hub of farm toy collecting in Canada.
The closest thing Canada has to a farm toy collecting club is the subscription list of a magazine called Tractor Classics, which is produced by the Hollands. They started the first toy parts business in Canada and organized the first farm toy shows in Saskatchewan.
“They are the ones that basically brought farm toys to Canada,” said Scott Lamb, a 15-year-old collector from Saskatoon who is carving out his own reputation in the farm toy community.
Holland considers this an overstatement.
“We’re really not the founders of farm toy collecting, but I guess we are the founders of getting motivated on the Prairies, such as giving them a magazine and starting up a parts department.”
Today, Tractor Classics has 2,000 subscribers, most from Canada, and toy shows are as plentiful as fowl suppers in the fall. The latest edition of Tractor Classics lists 15 shows scheduled for the Prairies between November and April.
It wasn’t always this way.
“When we started in the ’80s and you said, ‘I collect toys,’ everybody would giggle,” Holland noted.
“They’d say, ‘he’s gone back to his childhood.’ But if you collected coins or stamps, it was acceptable.”
In 1984, the Hollands had gone through a busy time on their grain and cattle farm west of Rocanville, Sask., and needed a break. A friend suggested they attend a farm toy show in North Dakota. The Hollands had never heard of this hobby, but decided to take in the show.
“Of course, walking down the aisles, Allan would say, ‘I have that tractor. Gee, that’s a nice tractor. Dad had one of those.’ So of course, we bought our first half a dozen at that show. And we had such a good time and met such a friendly bunch of people and we decided, ‘gee, this is fun.’ “
By 1986 they were serious collectors, concentrating on three specific lines – 1Ú16 scale John Deeres, 1Ú32 scale four-wheel drives, and crawler machines used for construction. Today they limit their purchases to keeping their lines up to date.
“When you’ve got 500 tractors in the house, you get picky.”
Allan also has a collection of pedal tractors, which were originally bought as toys for children.
This is different than the rest of their collection, which is mostly manufactured strictly for collectors.
The miniatures cost between $35 and $450, depending on the age-old law of supply and demand.
“Collectors’ toys are better quality and have more detail than play toys,” she said. “They usually are inscribed with the date and other information.
“Of course, sometimes with age a play toy becomes a collectors’ toy.”
Collectors buy their toys at shows, from mail order stores like the one operated by the Hollands, and from farm implement dealers. But sometimes that’s not enough.
“A toy is only made for so long,” Holland said.
“So if you come into collecting now and you want a toy that was made in the Eighties, you can’t buy it unless you find a junker.”
Restoring old implements that were once somebody’s toys spawned a booming parts business that Holland has since sold to an Alberta man.
“There’s a lot of fun in restoring and a lot of people do that.”
The room in Holland’s home directly behind the living room is the base for Allan’s crawler collection and also his workshop. Beat up tractor toys, often without wheels and exhaust stacks, are lovingly put back together at a cluttered table.
Holland isn’t surprised that interest in her hobby has exploded.
“The nice part of the hobby is that Grandpa and the little guy can go to a toy show and everybody can have a good time.”
Except for the magazine and the mail order business, which usually has an inventory worth about $80,000, Holland has been slowly phasing herself out of the organization end of toy collecting.
But she has no plans to stop collecting.
“I guess it gets in your blood, just like people who smoke and drink. Once you start, it’s hard to quit.”
