Columnist Tom Gorman: Living the good life in the slow lane

Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005 | 7:12 a.m.

There are some big conventions in town this week having to do with making fast, fancy cars go even faster and look even fancier after they leave the dealership.

Frankly, I'm not a fast-lane kind of guy. The only things I've added to my four-cylinder Camry are a couple of license plates. Superchargers, spoilers and soft suede seats are lost on me.

But because I love my Honey Ohs and Grape Nuts, I couldn't resist visiting another convention in town. More than 100 manufacturers of farm products are meeting at the Mirage.

These folks deserve our collective thanks. Not only will they donate to our local economy, but because they are at the cutting edge of farm equipment, they help bring food to our tables.

It's a straight-laced group -- I didn't spot a tattoo or gold chain in the bunch -- and you have to love their passion for things such as tillers, hay stackers, hitches and grain silos.

At a Ferrari booth, sales manager Christian Rossi from Mantova, Italy, gushed about the speed of his planting machines, which insert small plants such as tomatoes and lettuce from nursery trays into the ground.

Sounding more like a Ferrari car salesman, Rossi exclaimed: "Our fastest machine can do more than 8,000 plants an hour. On a four-row machine, that's 32,000 plants per hour. Thirty-two-thousand!"

Can the fellows at the after-market auto shows beat that?

A Canadian couple, David and Pat Farden, were pushing trailer-mounted racks that unload huge bales of hay in seconds without (get this!) hydraulics, winches or chains. When you're running hay from the fields to the feed yard, you'll wish you too had their Trihaul self-unloading bale mover.

Nearby, Jim Herrett of Filer, Idaho, was hawking products from Acme Manufacturing, a company his father started 59 years ago. Among them were blanket harrows, which look like chain-link fences that are dragged behind tractors to break up dirt clods and dried manure.

New this year was a quick-release draw bar that lets the farmer unhook the harrow from his tractor in record time. On the farm, time is money.

Some of the convention attendees spend a lot of time in Las Vegas. Ray Hildebrand, who sells all sorts of screws, nuts and bolts to farmers, also was going to meet some automotive customers and then return next week for a fasteners convention. Some screws-nuts-and-bolts salesmen can really live it up.

But not everyone is impressed with our Strip. Claudia Cecchella, who works for a company that makes contaminant-free grain dryers, said she was nonplussed by the Venetian, partly because she lives in the real Venice.

"It's a perfect, beautiful copy, and that is terrible," she said of Sheldon Adelson's replica. "I don't like copies of the true beauties that we have in Europe. You have Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. You don't need to copy Venice."

Mark Ziemann, busy selling tilling devices to break up hard soil (his nine-shank ripper is drop-dead gorgeous), said Las Vegas has nothing on his town of Perry, Iowa, population 6,000.

Perry is home of Hotel Pattee, a historical, four-star upscale hotel where each of the 40 rooms is individually themed and decorated. There's the Louis Armstrong Suite (because he stayed there once), a coal miner's room (think miner's lantern built into the night stand) and a "cream 'n eggs" room that salutes the farm women of the 1930s.

"It's got valet parking and a doorman," Ziemann bragged. "And it may not have a pool, but it's got a bowling alley."

We're lucky someone planted the idea that farm manufacturers have to come to Las Vegas for a good time.