First Appearance of Dakota Line Counted…But Performance Sold Dealership

Feb. 2000

Torrence Farm Equipment has been in business in California's Imperial Valley since 1939 and has had a store in the Thermal area since 1986. Its first exposure to Dakota equipment was at the Las Vegas golf course superintendent's show three years ago.

"We work the booths to see what the new equipment is. The Dakota line really looked really promising and you could tell that it was of high quality," Al Allal of Torrence relates. "That's when we got interested. Then we got some of our customers interested and went for a dealership. A lot of our customer base here in the Coachella Valley is the golf courses. I think we were the first or second dealership that Dakota had."

The company's store at Thermal (it also has stores at Heber and Brawley) is near some of the 100 or more golf courses located in the Palm Springs area. "The arrangement has been excellent. It is good equipment and we get great factory support. Dakota is a service-oriented company and they have supported us well," Allal says.

"We've sold seven, maybe eight of the 440s. We sold two of them with the spinners on them to Tradition Golf Course, a new course that is about a mile and a half long and when they went to top-dress the greens, it really got to be a long way to commute back to the material. The superintendent there, Lane Stave, thought having two machines would save both time and money; that they use one as a material handler to supply the one that was doing the topdressing. That way they wouldn't have to go all the way back to the shop each time to reload. They could load the material handler. Take it out to that end of the course and just use it to sub-feed the other machine," Allal says.

"We were up against a competitor but the Dakota delivery system was so much better that there was no comparison. And with the Dakota, you can control everything from the operator's seat on the tractor, rather than having to get down and push and pull levers. We actually sold those two machines without even demoing them," Allal says.

Those machines were among the first Dakota equipment on the West Coast.

"We've had them for about two and a half years now," says Mike Keeran, Traditions mechanic. "They've been working great. I think we got a few more people out here to buy them after we started using them. You can work them from the tractor; you don't have to get off like you have to do with the others. Every time Torrence gets a demo down here, it's gone... they're sold. They (Torrence) had a field day on our golf course that went over really well."

"They are especially great for filling sand traps and for topdressing," Keeran says. "People may think that it's a lot of money, but if you think about the time and manpower that you can save when doing those jobs, they're really worth it. And, if you have a course where you just have a few guys, you've definitely got to have one of these machines. They save so much time.

"I came from a place where we used to do it all by hand. It would take six guys; not the two guys we use and we're doing it twice as fast now, too.

"We especially like it for seeding," he says. "Everybody is down here at the shop in the morning during seeding time, so we get them all opening seed bags and fill one 440 with seed. That way whenever the guy goes out of seed, he doesn't have to stop to open seed bags all day. He can just pull up under the loaded 440, fill up and away he goes. It really speeds up the process. And you don't have bags all over the place, either, or seed spilled here and there. Oh, you still spill a little bit of seed but we put a tarp under the Dakota and, when we're down, we pull it ahead and dump what's on the tarp back into the machine."

The 440s have really done well, according to Allal, who is "pretty excited about Dakota's new 410 top-dresser, too. We've ordered one in. They also have a new dethatcher that we think is going to be a real success. It does the job in one pass that would normally take two to three passes to complete. It has the right amount of scalp-down and brings a little soil up right before you go to over-seeding.

"We really enjoy and appreciate the service we get from the factory," Allal says. "If we have a problem, we call up and they're right on it. As a dealer, we really like that... we're never out on a limb by ourselves. They've always followed through with any problems that we've had."