The Buhler name can be found atop buildings across Winnipeg and Winkler, Man., as farm machinery financier John Buhler spends the latter part of his career and retirement supporting worthy causes.
The Buhler name has also long adorned factory buildings in Manitoba and North Dakota.
However, it will soon disappear from the farm equipment that is manufactured by Buhler’s former company.
Instead, the equipment that Buhler acquired in earlier purchases will regain their heritage names.
“It’ll be odd, because it’s a really big name in Manitoba, but what hasn’t changed in farming?” said Keystone Agricultural Producers president Ian Wishart.
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Buhler Industries removed the Buhler name from its tractors in 2008, reclaiming the Versatile trade name that had previously been dropped.
Now the company’s augers, hay equipment and other smaller items will bear the name Farm King, which the company said was needed to give a unified identity to the products.
“The farmers at the trade shows in the United States, when they saw a Buhler auger, 50 percent of the time they called it a Farm King anyway,” said Buhler Industries marketing manager Adam Reid.
“Here, (the Buhler name) is fairly well known, but when you get down into the U.S., even two to three hours past Fargo where we have a plant, nobody really knows what the Buhler name means.”
The name also created problems for Buhler Industries because it seemed foreign to some American farmers.
“There was some perception when you got down even into Iowa that Buhler was a German company importing machinery from Europe,” Reid said.
“We had to make sure we were seen as a North American company.”
The silent “H” was also a problem.
“Down in Louisville, Kentucky, some people were not sure how to pronounce it,” Reid said.
“That’s a bit of a barrier to success when you’re trying to show a guy what we consider to be one of the best augers in the business and he’s thinking about how to say the name.”
Bringing back the Versatile name revived memories for farmers across North America and was reported on in a number of American farm newspapers. The company hopes the Farm King name’s promotion will have the same impact.
Buhler is on the board of directors of Buhler Industries, which is controlled by Russia’s Combine Factory Rostselmash, and didn’t object to the return of the Versatile name in 2008.
Reid thinks he’ll be OK with this change, too.
