AUBURN — They’ve had the land on Minot Avenue for nine years and decided now was the time to go big — an indoor showroom for 40 to 50 tractors.

Hammond Tractor is building up the road from its store with five times the space for parts and room to display 10 times as many tractors.

The $4 million project broke ground in May and is expected to wrap up in late November.

“People will be able to shop on rainy days, snowy, nasty windy days,” said General Manager David Hammond, who co-owns the company with his father, Gary. “I think we’re one of the very few people who are stepping up and investing in a tractor dealership.”

The state’s largest tractor dealer, the company sells tractors ranging from $1,599 to $400,000.

It’s also the largest John Deere dealer in New England.

Hammond Tractor, founded in 1983 and headquartered in Fairfield, has been in the area since 2008 when it bought Delekto Bros. and Hammond Equipment (no relation.)

Gary Hammond said the Hammond Equipment purchase included 27 acres of farmland at 1525 Minot Ave. that felt like a good place to expand someday.

“We’ve simply outgrown the present store,” he said.

All 22 employees will make the short move and they anticipate hiring four to five more as business grows.

At 9,000 square feet, the Auburn store had been the smallest of its three locations. Gary Hammond said the pair spent several years designing the new 25,000-square-foot facility, including time scouting dealerships across New England.

“We’d go out in the car and make lists: What’s our takeaway from here, what features did we like, what didn’t we like,” Gary said.

“We saw more stuff that we didn’t like than we did,” David added.

The end result, they hope, is a store with easy sight lines to staff and different departments and plenty of room to kick the tractor tires.

David Hammond said roughly 40 percent of customers are farmers, 40 percent residential buyers and 20 percent commercial (construction companies, landscapers, rental companies).

They’re seeing large farms get larger and new niche farmers entering the market. In the past four to five years, engineering strides have also made smaller tractors easier to operate and switch out implements, he said, which has helped grow that residential market.

“The small property owner that has gardens, they want to bushhog their field, they want snowplowing, they have a driveway that needs grading; there’s a hundred different uses for them,” David Hammond said. “We sell hundreds of them every year. Everybody wants to have a tractor.”

Gary Hammond did the initial site work for the project two years ago, adding roads and utilities. Since May, he’s logged 12- to 14-hour days with excavation work that’s included bringing in 500 loads of gravel.

“I grew up on a dairy farm in Greene and we were also excavation contractors; I’ve done it for 55 years, I love doing it,” he said. “I mostly like doing it so it’s done the way I want it.”

Hammond Tractor has locations in Auburn, Union and Fairfield and 90 employees companywide. Father and son both live in Sidney and work out of the Fairfield office.

The expansion in Auburn, Gary Hammond said, represents the largest investment in the company’s 34-year history.

“We’re investing a lot of money in our future; the size of the building, the way it’s laid out, it’s going to be exciting to get it finished,” he said. “(Auburn) has a different customer base than we have at our other two stores; there’s a lot of potential here. We’ve needed a larger store and more staff to be more aggressive here.”

kskelton@sunjournal.com

Copy the Story Link

Comments are not available on this story.