Growing up on a diversified family farm instilled an appreciation in Tim Brannon for the ecosystem that feeds the world from a young age, although if you ask him what his first memory of agriculture was, he will say he was thrown face-first into it.
“I was riding in my dad's lap on a WD Allis-Chalmers tractor, and it had no power steering,” Brannon recalls. “He was supposed to be babysitting and I fell asleep, and I fell forward into the steering wheel. He turned loose of the steering wheel to pull my head back and just like a baseball card in a spoke of a bicycle wheel, my nose was flipping up and it bloodied my nose and my lip.
“He knew he was in trouble with my mother. He threw the rake off and went to the house thinking he would beat her home, but he didn’t. She looked at him and she said, ‘You have killed my son.’”
He, of course, survived his dad’s “babysitting,” and those who have been part of his life and legacy since would all agree that the world is a better place for it.
Dealership Beginnings
While living and working on the family farm, Brannon developed an affinity for the mechanical aspect of the operation. He loved to see the machinery work and they were always trying to improve it even marginally over what the manufacturer’s expectations were.
“Sometimes our improvements were not improvements; other attempts worked out really well,” Brannon says.
“A big help on our farm was the new store manager, Frank Coles at Austin Equipment in Paris, who allowed me to come in and look up or order needed parts. I developed a good relationship with the parts manager, Gaylon Morris.”
Coles then asked him to work part-time when he was off school. Brannon did, and still managed to graduate Cum Laude in 3 years from Murray State Univ. in 1975 with his agriculture degree plus a teaching certificate.
Following college, he had the opportunity to work at Allis-Chalmers (A-C) Corp. for 3.5 years where he excelled at developing dealers as a territory manager.
In fact, Brannon signed on 6 dealerships in one year's time, “which was unbelievable” recalls John Johansen, then vice president of North American Sales & Service for A-C.
In 1978, Brannon returned to his Tennessee roots when the local dealership became available. He and Steve Gallimore went in together to purchase the dealership from Jim Austin, and over 47 years later Brannon remains firmly grounded in B&G Equipment.
“I would say that his pathway was much more practical, as he learned what OEMs’ thresholds were and then put that to work in his dealership in a way that took care of the customer and his team first, but never forgot the supplier,” says Eric Raby, Senior Vice President — Americas at Claas, who got to know Brannon during his time with AGCO. “However staunch he was in taking a dealer approach, he still never lost sight of the fact that OEMs have valid topics that must be considered as well.”
Advocating for No-Till
Around the time Tim Brannon was in high school, no-till farming came to be an advent and his family was highly vested in it. “He was a strong promoter of no-till,” says John Johansen, former Vice President of North American Sales & Service for Allis-Chalmers (A-C). “We had a program, which I had instituted, called Circle of Honor. Each year in the winter months we would recognize dealers in top performance across the nation. Tim was in the top salesman or dealership in performance of sales of no-till planters. We were fortunate that A-C developed the No-Til Coulter. We were out there promoting and changing the whole attitude of how to do conservation tillage and were instrumental in doing away with the moldboard plow, deep tillage and that type of thing, and bringing on the coulter. He was very instrumental in that.”
Read more about the A-C No-Til Planter & Coulter:
Turbulence Ahead
Things were going well for B&G Equipment for the first few years, but then the 1980s hit and they hit hard — drought, low prices, dealers going out, customers going out. Brannon recalls they lost $600k one year, which in the 1980s was an unthinkable loss.
“There were some days it took two hands to turn the key in the door because one hand said, ‘I’m not going to do it. I’m just going to go home,’” Brannon remembers.
“But we had employees to think about and we had our customers to think about. We couldn’t just leave them.”
So, Brannon called in former A-C dealer Edgar Paschall, who was both well respected and dynamic in his approach, and asked if he would sell for them and evaluate the market. Paschall directed Brannon to look at the equipment that’s going at sales and dealer closeouts.
“Our banker was his former banker, so we had a value-added trust factor to develop a credit line to execute a plan,” Brannon says. “We bought a lot of equipment at bargain prices; at one auction we purchased 20 used combines. So when everybody else was trying to get rid of them, we were buying them at a bargain and running them through the shop. We made very good margins on them. That’s what helped us through, and it also perpetuated a parts business for us.”
The 1980s also brought about the need for dealers farther south in Tennessee when other dealers went out of business. Brannon and Gallimore opened a store closer to that area, and then opened a store in Hopkinsville, Ky. (sold to Whayne Supply Company in 2014), and later on moved to Troy, Tenn. Every decision to expand and open stores was driven by Brannon’s customer-centric, farmer-first mentality. He saw the huge loss and inconvenience it would have been for customers, and he acted on it.
“Tim has an uncanny ability to read the tea leaves of the market to determine not only when to grow, but when to sharpen focus on the core of the business,” says Raby. “My intuition tells me that he and his team made the right decisions for the right reasons, and always with the customer in mind.”
Up in Smoke
The resilience that brought Brannon through the turbulence of the 1980s was put to the test in 2023 as the business literally went up in flames. The dealership fire was a total loss, with only rolling stock surviving. As Brannon and his employees stood and watched it burn, he made a decision.
“I was watching the building go up in smoke and I said, ‘Well, we’ve got the insurance. I’m 70 years old. Maybe this is a good time to quit,’” Brannon recalls.
Jennifer Culpepper, B&G’s Office Manager, says that fire was the most defining moment for this dealership.
Tim Brannon, Farm Equipment Dealer Hall of Fame 2026
“We all realized there was nothing left to do but stand back and watch in shock as the building and our livelihoods burned to the ground,” Culpepper says. “Tim almost immediately started reassuring everyone that we would rebuild and that our jobs were secure. He could have easily taken the insurance payout and retired. But he looked at each of us and, without hesitation, started making plans to get back to work.”
“‘I know what I got to do,’” Brannon remembers thinking. “‘We’re going to build back better.’ And we did.” In just over a year they had a new building in the same location.
“I believe most men at his age and given the circumstances would be enjoying their retirement and piddling on the farm right now,” Culpepper says. “But, he still shows up every day, works just as hard as anyone else in the building, and made sure that his B&G family remained intact.”
Leading With Loyalty
As evidenced by his longstanding commitment to seeing B&G Equipment through even the darkest of times, Brannon says for him it is all about the people he surrounds himself with.
“I am not one who grabs the sword and dashes out ahead of the troops — that only works usually in movies,” he says. “I try to surround myself with people who are smarter than I am.
“When we started selling dealerships, I brought my cousin Larry Brannon back into it and he is the best parts man, bar none, as far as order projections.
“I’ve got really good techs and it lets me sit back and smile a lot of times when customers or even some of the company guys refer some of those really tough cases to us and say, ‘See what they can do about it.’ That’s a compliment to our dealership and to our people.”
“He wants the best for his people & he wants the best for his customers, & he’s willing to do whatever it takes at the dealership level to provide that…” – John Johansen, former Vice President of North American Sales & Service for Allis-Chalmers
Part of growing his team is allowing people to fulfill their potential by letting them make mistakes, learning lessons from them, and developing self-discipline from that.
“He truly has the gift of encouragement,” Larry Brannon, explains. “When people do well, he thanks them. When they do wrong, he always encourages them to learn from the mistakes and doesn’t hound them about it. He believes in us.”
Culpepper describes Brannon as a patient and calm fatherlike figure. “Tim has taught me the value of giving second — and third and fourth — chances when I’m ready to give up on an employee or situation. He sees the good in people and wants to believe people deserve a little grace.
“The way he treats his employees inspires loyalty and is why we have very little turnover. His understanding has allowed me and other employees to be more present in parenting and caring for aging loved ones.”
Brannon credits much praise to his wife, Debbie, for her support on the home front and raising their kids while he was working long hours and helping people. “I’ve been blessed.”
Community Impact & Generational Learning
Brannon’s impact extends far beyond the realms of B&G and the farm equipment business. He served 10 years on the school board, helped with the World’s Fair, is the music director at his church and works charitably as often as possible.
“Tim also buys livestock at the fairs to help the farm children,” Larry Brannon says. He goes on to detail the scholarship Tim and his brother, Dr. Tony Brannon of Murray State Univ., started to help students continue in agriculture. “His motto always has been ‘Take care of those who take care of you.’”
Brannon believes in the power of knowledge-sharing, recently participating in a dealer panel at the 2025 Farm Equipment Manufacturers Assn.'s annual convention.
He also contributes a regular web column for Rural Lifestyle Dealer — “Equipment Dealer Tips, Tales & Takeaways” — with the goal of sharing experiences and lessons with fellow rural equipment dealerships throughout North America.
While he has and continues to work hard to help advance the next generation of agriculture, he says he has just as much to learn about what’s ahead as what’s already in place.
“The technology increases are just mind-boggling,” Brannon says. “And no one could have had that idea from 1965 or '66 except those people in engineering that dared to go out and break new ground and say, ‘This will work.’ And when it didn’t work, they’d say, ‘I like the concept, how can we make it work?’ And they did.”
He acknowledges that embracing those changes becomes harder the older a person gets, but connecting with younger people at events like the annual Precision Farming Dealer Summit is humbling and inspiring.
“These guys are using technology to do things I never dreamed about, and hats off to them,” he says.
Dealership Experience on the School Board
Brannon’s tenure on the school board presented several unseen opportunities to help future generations with access to modern facilities and technical coursework, an area that continues to be a growing topic of discussion today.
“I'll be honest, the reason I got on it — and the statistics show that anybody that runs for a school board is there for one issue — and that was something that hit a hot button,” Brannon explains. “I got on the school board because we were going to have to consolidate schools and we were going to have probably a huge tax increase and I didn't want the property tax increase to come in and I didn't think the schools needed to be consolidated.
“However, when I got on the school board and you looked at all the facts, another farmer who was on the school board called me at 1 o'clock in the morning and he said, ‘You know what we've got to do?’ And I said, ‘I do, but do you have the guts to do it?’ And he said, ‘I guess we'll find out together.’ So as a result in my 10-year tenure, we consolidated four schools into two and renovated a high school, and we did not have one cent of property tax increase.
“We used some of the techniques we use in farming with balloon payments and some leases and using that type of strategy was able to wrap some debt around what the county had. And so everybody was happy not to have had a tax increase. And we have all modern beautiful schools.”
Brannon also says they brought in colleges to bring some college-level courses back down to their high school, and were also proponents of technical education — still an important initiative today.
For the Love of Agriculture
Although the tea leaves are still yet to be determined for the years to come, Brannon can confidently say helping others will always be most fulfilling for him, and that stems from his love for God and love for agriculture.
“Agriculture is what feeds the world,” Brannon explains. “When I was with the company, we built the equipment that helped feed the world. Then at the dealership, we provided the equipment to farmers to help feed the world and make a living doing it.
“It is almost a religious experience to realize that what the good Lord created he’s put us in charge of to maintain and use to feed our fellow man.”
He remains deeply humbled to be inducted into the Farm Equipment Dealer Hall of Fame, as well as to have had the honor of working with other great names in the industry all working toward the same goal.
“Life is a series of battles. You have to choose which ones you fight, and you have to win them keeping in mind that it is not going to be the last battle you win. The field of farm machinery and farm equipment dealerships is a tough profession, but it is something we have to have.”
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