Ask most Jeep or farm tractor enthusiasts about the Farm Jeep, and you will get one of two responses. A blank stare — they’ve never heard of it. Or a dismissive shrug — “yeah, it never really worked, did it? It was a failure.”

Both responses represent a problem. This book is the argument for why the Farm Jeep was important and why today’s Jeep and antique tractor fans should care.

The Farm Jeep was not a failure. It was the bridge that kept the Jeep brand alive long enough to become an American icon. The CJ-2A that rolled off the Willys-Overland line in 1945 — marketed as a tractor before the war was even over — launched a platform that ran continuously for nearly four decades. The CJ-3B stayed in production until 1968. The CJ-5 until 1983. The “Fun Jeep” explosion of the 1970s and 1980s — the cultural moment that turned Jeep into a lifestyle brand — didn’t emerge from nowhere. It emerged from a platform that farm and utility sales (the Willys pickup, station wagon, and delivery sedan) had quietly kept alive through twenty-five lean years while Detroit’s giants ignored it.

That is not a footnote. That is the story.

What History Got Wrong

The “failure” label comes from measuring the Farm Jeep against the wrong standard. Yes, the Willys CJ could not replace a dedicated row-crop tractor on a large commercial farm. It couldn’t match the horsepower of a John Deere A or the crop clearance of a Farmall M. Nobody who built the Farm Jeep expected it to. What Willys-Overland needed in 1945 wasn’t dominance — it was survival. The company had spent the entire war building one product for one customer. When that customer — the United States Government — no longer needed jeeps by the hundreds of thousands, Willys needed a reason for farmers, contractors, orchardists, and small landowners to keep walking through dealership doors.

Charles Sorensen, the production genius who had built B-24 bombers at Willow Run and Fordson and 9N tractors before that, understood this perfectly. He didn’t come to Toledo to make Willys into a tractor company. He came to make the Jeep indispensable. A vehicle that could plow a field in the morning, haul a load to town at noon, run a buzz saw in the afternoon, and drive the family to church on Sunday didn’t need to be the best tractor on the market. It needed to be the only machine capable of all four tasks — and priced so that a returning veteran with a small farm and a tight budget could afford it.

For a remarkable stretch of postwar American history, it worked.

The People Who Made It — And the Corporations That Forgot Them

This book is not a history of a machine. It is a history of the people who fought to bring that machine to life — and the corporations that ultimately abandoned their work without understanding what they were discarding.

You will meet Charles Sorensen, who arrived at Willys like a force of nature and left having saved the company’s future, though the company would not fully realize it for another thirty years. You will meet Jabez Love, the Michigan engineer who had been building his own truck-tractors since the 1930s and who gave the Farm Jeep its hydraulic soul. You will meet the Monroe Auto Equipment Company of Monroe, Michigan, and the McIntyre family, who owned it and whose corporate ambition very nearly destroyed everything Sorensen and Love had built.

And you will meet Robert Green. If this book has a hero, it is Green — a quiet hydraulic engineer from Bowling Green, Ohio, who spent more than a decade as the sole institutional memory of the Farm Jeep program. He outlasted Sorensen. He outlasted Love. He survived the Monroe debacle. He fought stubbornly for a machine he could simultaneously call “a piece of shit tractor” and believe in completely. When he finally left Willys in 1955, he took with him the last serious attempt to keep the Jeep’s agricultural identity alive. The CJ-5 launched that same year — and would run for another twenty-eight years on the foundation he helped build.

History barely recorded him. This book attempts to correct that.

The 4-in-1 Promise

Willys-Overland marketed the postwar Jeep as four machines in one: a Tractor, a Truck, a Passenger Car, and a Mobile Power Plant. It was an audacious claim, and not entirely unjustified. The tension at the heart of this book is the gap between that promise and the engineering reality — the immense challenge of turning a military scout car into something a farmer could use to make a living.

That gap was never fully closed. The Farm Jeep remained, to its end, a compromise machine — better than nothing for a small operator, never quite enough for a serious one. But “better than nothing” was enough. It was enough to keep the dealers selling. Enough to keep the engineers iterating. Enough to keep the platform alive until the world caught up to what the Farm Jeep had always been — a compact, four-wheel-drive utility vehicle for people who needed to get work done in places where roads ran out.

Kubota figured that out. Kawasaki figured that out. John Deere figured that out. Willys — or rather the succession of corporations that swallowed Willys whole — did not.

How to Use This Book

This is not a scholarly document, and I am not a scholar. I am a citizen-historian who has been taking a Farm Jeep to antique tractor shows for fourteen years, opening waterproof binders in the back of the vehicle to explain to curious crowds why a Jeep is sitting among the John Deeres and Farmalls. This book is the evolution of those binders.

It is built for two kinds of readers.

If you are a Willys Jeep enthusiast — someone who knows what a CJ-2A is, who has wondered what those strange brackets on the rear of early civilian Jeeps were for — this book will give you the corporate and human story behind the machines you already love. The engineering details are here, but they serve the story, not the other way around.

If you are a tractor collector or farm historian — someone who thinks of the postwar period in terms of the Ford 8N, the Ferguson TO-20, and the dawn of three-point hitch agriculture — this book will show you a chapter in that story that most histories skip entirely. The Farm Jeep competed directly with those tractors, was tested at the Nebraska Labs, and carved out a niche that the tractor industry eventually absorbed and made its own.

The book is designed to be read at three levels:

• 🔭 The 10,000-Foot View — an introduction to each chapter, written for any reader. The people, the companies, the big decisions. Start here. If that doesn’t spark an interest, scroll down to the “To Sum Up This Chapter” before moving on.
• ▶ The Main Narrative — following the 10K view, is the main story, with embedded films and ads. Some history is better watched than read. Not every chapter will have videos, but those videos are worth watching when they appear.
• ⛏ Dig Deeper — every chapter ends with a link to the primary sources, original documents, technical data, and more videos for readers who want the evidence behind the story. This is where the e-book format earns its keep.

A Note on Sources — and Mysteries

Fourteen years of research have answered many questions. It has also opened new ones. Some of the most important figures in this story — Robert Green, especially — left thin paper trails. Where the evidence is solid, I say so. Where it is circumstantial, I say that too. Where a mystery remains genuinely unsolved, I would rather leave it open than invent a tidy conclusion.

I have used AI extensively as a research and editing assistant — primarily for the background chapters covering 1900–1944, where I needed context I hadn’t spent years building myself. I verified every source it pointed me toward. The conclusions, the arguments, and the errors in this book are mine.

You will also note that almost all primary sources beyond Chapter 3 cite my work at FarmJeep.com. With very few exceptions, there aren’t any other sources of information on Robert Green and Jabez Love. With the exception of historian Clint Dixon, there is little to no written history of the involvement of the Monroe Auto Equipment Company and the McIntyre family, who owned it.

If you find a mistake, or if you know something I don’t — and someone reading this almost certainly does — I want to hear from you. That is the other advantage of an e-book: it can be corrected and improved. Reach me at barry@farmjeep.com.

One final note. When you see the word “we,” it refers to my son and partner, Evan. I tend to switch between “I” and “we” because we are always in this together.

The Farm Jeep was real. It was remarkable. And it is long past time it was remembered correctly.

— Barry

Let’s get started.

To understand the Jeep, we must first look at the muddy fields of the early 1900s…