fox farm equipment?

swindave · Feb 16, 2021

what ever happen to fox farm equipment company?
i know there no longer in business,

but it seemed they sold a lot of choppers, and a few forage blowers to,
any one ever used their stuff? what all equipment did they make?

i was just curious , thanks for your answer!

BarnyardEngineering · Feb 16, 2021

You pretty much know what happened... They went out of business.

I think they went through a couple of owners before finally hanging it up for good.

Here's a write-up of their history:
http://agriculturalmachineryengineering.weebly.com/fox-choppers.html

Eagle Beagle · Feb 16, 2021

Back in the 60's and 70's Monfort Feeding and packing operations around Greeley used to custom chop and haul corn silage to fill their multi-acre pits. Two row and three row self propeled Fox choppers were what they ran. 24 hour shifts if I remember correctly. Several hundred acres per day.

They had yellow cabover Ford and Chevy trucks with side dump. Also neighbor had a 2 row Fox chopper behind a 930 Case.

Beagle

lugnuts2030 · Feb 16, 2021

Fox choppers were popular, but the silo filling Blower was a poor design in my book, had one a short time.

Timmycornpicker · Feb 16, 2021

Fox was bought by Koehring who also bought Brady. Became their Fox-Brady division. Koehring went bankrupt in the early 80s and Piper Industries bought Fox-Brady. That lasted 5 or so years and Piper failed. Hiniker acquired the parts support for Fox-Brady and continued to produce the old Brady cut and throw flail chopper. I'm not sure if the Hiniker stalk shredders came from Fox-Brady or not, but the rest of the Fox-Brady line disappeared.

fastfarmall · Feb 16, 2021

As a kid their was a feedlot,near my dads farm, they bought a Fox self propelled chopper,it seems to work ok, it had a Detroit,2 cycle in it,30 years later i seen one, their wasn't much to it,but as kid, i thought that was a monster, with the 2 row corn head,it was the Model A of the chopper business!

coonie minnie · Feb 16, 2021

they mostly made forage harvesters, but also blowers, forage boxes, and transfer tables. the choppers were the top of the line in their day. We had a lot of them, and still use a MaxII self propelled to open fields.

NY 986 · Feb 16, 2021

Bad individual luck in Koerhring going bankrupt but the simple fact was by the 1990's there were too many manufacturers chasing a declining market. Small dairies were giving way to larger farms so the need for flail choppers, pull type forage harvesters, blowers was on the decline. Having a wider product line for a short line company such as New Holland maintained vital store traffic at dealerships while having a very small offering got companies such as Fox pushed out. By the 1980's I can not think of one prominent farm equipment dealer here that carried Fox. Most farmers were going to JD, IH, or NH for forage equipment by then. Also, it did not help that to get equipment such as Fox financed that the farmer had to be subject to the whim of the local bank or Farm Credit during the tough 1980's. The credit arms of JD and NH helped sell a lot of equipment then.

coonie minnie · Feb 16, 2021

True comments. Add to that the fact that Fox was likely a higher price point than their competition. In the 60's and early 70's, they were still ahead engineering-wise, as they had a separate cylinder and blower decades before Deere, IH, etc that still had blower mounted knives, cut and throw, etc. When Koering and then Piper took over, little was spent on R and D, and the competition caught up with similar features. Fox still had more iron, but also that higher price tag, and no company financing.

I'm not sure Fox ever had a big following in the Northeast, but did in the Midwest and West.

connor9988 · Feb 16, 2021

Several years ago a neighbor sold his fox chopper to a gentleman who was interested in the engine to make a puller out of.

I managed to save the seat off of it and put it on my 300. I wish I had gotten the stand as well. I believe it was a Kneodler seat and stand.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nJXrgc_ZXnE" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Loosehandle · Feb 16, 2021

Always thought the decal/logo was cool

NY 986 · Feb 16, 2021

They were always a very minor player here. Most dairies in NY were hard scrabble in terms of finances in those days. Going into the 1970's there was still a healthy market for cut and throw forage harvesters as their cost was less than cut and blow units. My road had a number of IH cut and throw units and there were plenty of NH Super 717's and 718's around.

Tom OConnor · Feb 16, 2021

In the nineteen fiftys they were the Cadillac of forage harvesters. Dad bought one and it had a six cylinder Red Seal Continental Engine on it that was as smooth running as anything at that time and we hauled it with a Farmal M. My brother put himself through Notre Dame University doing custom silo filling with it. I remember it so well because there always a job or two that he could not get finished before he had to leave for school and I had to finish up. It had a unique cutting cylinder with twisted and curved knives that were kept razor sharp. You were always very careful not to let a wrench slip when you were changing those knives. Dad died in fifty one and I remember using that chopper well into the sixtys.

Ken Loewenhagen · Feb 16, 2021

Along with what's been already said, they were developing a soil saver type of machine when the plant in Appleton WI. shut down. That was where Fox equip was built. They had two built. They were sold to a farmer who had to sign papers that he could never sell or trade them. They were supposed to be destroyed when he didn't want them anymore. I lived and still do, 14 miles from the Fox building. There were many Fox pieces of equip in this area. Back then, if you didn't have Fox equip or Huebner self unloading racks, you had 3rd rated equip. My dad even worked at Fox for a few years. As said, Fox didn't keep up with the other companies in development and people started buying other brands.

Centerplate · Feb 16, 2021

I have been around the self propelled with the Detroit and Continental engines, but never owned one. I did have a 425 but it was a bit too small at the time.

JK-NY · Feb 16, 2021

In my area (Central NY) which had a lot of smaller dairy farms thru the early 1990's there were a few Fox choppers around. My neighbor down the road had one with a 2 row corn head that was used till he retired 10-12 years ago. I also had another friend who I helped occaisonally that had one. They seemed to be a well built unit for their time . A few of the self propelled Fox choppers were around too. I belive "formerly NY Bill" who posts here has a seif propelled Fox chopper. As NY986 stated the most popular brands of forage equipment in Upstate NY at that time period were NH, JD, IH . Also post WW2 Papec had some market share in NY as they were NY built and probably shipping cost would give them an edge. I dont believe I have ever seen any other Fox equipment around here besides the choppers.

formerly ny bill · Feb 16, 2021

one of the first self unloading wagons in the valley was a Fox. Dad bought it after the first owner used it a year. The carcass is still out in skid row. Kind of crude, but it was a new design.
I bought a 1960 2 row SPF self propelled chopper in 1977 for $1600. Old farmer commented to me "you can buy a lot of extra gas for $1600". Also have a 3 row 6250 that I still use to open fields and cut roadways. Both choppers came with grass heads at the time.
It seemed to me that Fox made things too simple for the "Look, something shiny!" crowd, such as reversing feed rolls by tightening the other side of the feed roll drive belt, vs. a nice control box and electric switches, and that led farmers away to other brands.

to get on the SPF, you stepped on the ring in the center of the tire, then to the top of the tire, then to the platform.

the 2 choppers I use now.

Glen SW Wi · Feb 16, 2021

Worked for a dairy farmer who had a 1 row eight knife Fox pull type chopper. Chopper had a Lori engine. He had a lot of marshland and used a Cletrac crawler to pull it. He ran the crawler and I ran the stake truck. Had to stay mighty close to that crawler track. Some of that corn was 14ft tall so he would have to stop and let the chopper catch up and I had to keep going and make a loop back to the chopper to keep from sinking out of sight in the soft marsh ground. Of course when I came back in the windshield would get all slopped up from the fresh cut corn. Was fun trying to see how close I was coming to the equipment. Maybe that explains why I had a few gray hairs when I was eighteen.

coonie minnie · Feb 16, 2021

I spent 4 years in college in central NY, and I remember being on a field trip close to Ithaca. The farm had a Fox "transfer table", kind of a stationary forage box you parked by the blower, and dumped onto with a truck. I had never seen one before, and was surprised to see it there. Since then, I've seen a couple in WI.

formerly ny bill · Feb 16, 2021

I used to see a lot of crunched RF fenders on the old silage trucks.

NY 986 · Feb 16, 2021

Dad's father had a flywheel type Papec 1 row chopper. During the 1970's and early 1980's all the choppers and blowers in the neighborhood were IH. A couple local Case dealers handled Fox but were gone by the mid-1970's.

Timmycornpicker · Feb 16, 2021

Back when it was a dairy area, there were a lot of Fox choppers in the west central part of New Jersey and across the river in Bucks County PA because of the efforts of D&R Equipment.

Olyj1947 · Feb 17, 2021

I had a Fox Super 1000 chopper with a 2 row corn head and hay head. It was really built heavy and strong. We pulled silage wagons beside and blew directly into them.It was a 5 man operation with 1 in the pit packing, the chopper operator and 3 hauling. It is excellent feed though,

showcrop · Feb 17, 2021

My friend here in NH had a two row that he used up until fifteen or so years ago. I had been aware of others being used as well, so they had a presence here

BarnyardEngineering · Feb 17, 2021

What led farmers away to other brands were, the other brands. An IH dealer, or a JD dealer, or a Massey dealer, is not going to carry Fox because they have their own lines of forage equipment.

That left small independent short line dealers, who simply could not compete against the big brands.

talltreestn · Jan 27, 2022

My Dad bought a FOX chopper in 1947. It had the Continental engine--47hp. It was the 'Cadillac' of its time, heavy, high capacity, etc. The major issue I recall was the cutting knife drive arrangement. From the gear drive to that shaft was a series of heavy universal joints including shear-pin assembly, which would reliably self destruct, sending parts flying past the pulling tractor seat!. We filled our own and dozens of custom silos over the years including 24 X 80's which were pretty big in the mid to late 50's.

1961 we bought a used pto unit to run behind our NEW JD 4010D.

fox farm equipment?

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