Editor's Note: ACM merged with Parallel Ag in June 2024 and as of Jan. 1, is now known as Parallel Ag: Upper Midwest Division. McCartney is now Vice President of Mergers & Acquisitions of the new entity, assisting with future growth plans in the region.

In 1950, a Durand, Ill., filling station owner by the name of Al McCartney was visited by a traveling Allis-Chalmers sales rep. Following a quick conversation, Al became an equipment dealer under the name A.C. McCartney (ACM). Months later, Al’s wife gave birth to a second son, Woody McCartney.

Woody, a 2025 inductee into the Farm Equipment Dealer Hall of Fame class for his achievements at ACM, literally grew up in a business that must have felt like a twin brother. His earliest memories are darting through the shop as a 3-year-old, daily climbs onto his favorite tractor (Allis Chalmers WD45) and later accompanying mechanics on service calls.

Name: Woody McCartney

Dealership: A.C. McCartney (ACM)

City: Durand, Ill.

Primary Lines: AGCO, Drago, Kuhn, KuhnKrause, Woods, Manitou, Great Plains

Locations: 5 (Durand, Wataga, Carthage, Mt. Sterling, and Fulton, Ill.)

His dream was to work in the store, though a firm offer of employment didn’t come until he was about to graduate as a CPA from the Univ. of Illinois in 1972. By then, the small dealer sold A-C, Hesston and New Idea. At a supper meeting shortly before graduation, Al offered to sweeten the $10,000 a year salary his son was being wooed with at the big accounting firms — with the promise of a company car.

From that day on, Woody’s career solidified as a dealer. He ran the accounting department and assisted his dad in sales, while his brother, Dave, was managing the parts area. After he and Dave bought out their father in 1979, Woody became president — just a few years ahead of the worst calamity ever to hit the ag business.

Fast forward to 2025. McCartney has been around long enough to have seen the average combine price of $25,000 to today’s offering that is approaching $1 million. He recalls the year the business hit $1 million in revenue and when his new 5-store operation topped $100 million for the first time. He saw the computer replace the card-cataloging system and how the cell phone forever changed the dynamic and hustle that was previously required for on-farm calls.

Profiles of Leadership

McCartney’s CPA background, which would be quickly enhanced through his bank board work, made him unique among dealer execs up until the start of the 21st century. For the first 3 decades, most of McCartney’s contemporaries were founders’ offspring who’d cut their teeth in sales or service.

Few dealers at the time held accounting degrees, and far fewer were assigned to sales management roles. As an accountant-turned-salesman-turned executive, McCartney was an industry unicorn.

Managing the numbers was a natural for his educational interests, and his affinity for the customers as a youth made sales and sales management an easy transition. “Even as a 22-year-old, I knew all the customers,” he says. “I’d been on all their farms many times, and so I already had relationships with the customers.


“Every one of McCartney’s conversations had a purpose to it. He knows how to connect with customers as well as employees ... You just don’t get handed loyalty from the customer at this level; he got his customers to follow him…” – Gary Manke, Retired Vice President, NAEDA


When McCartney was 29, he was asked to serve on the board of the Durand State Bank, just prior to the ag recession. Ten years later, at age 39, he was elected chairman of the board and served in that capacity for the next 30 years. “That experience helped me understand financing and banking when times were so tough for farmers and dealers.”

Known to be detail-oriented, McCartney is credited for resisting micromanagement, which may be a relative strong suit. “I want everybody prepared and detailed, of course, but I don’t micromanage,” he says. “If I give them the responsibility, I let them go. I oversee them, but I don’t micromanage. We hire good people, give them the parameters of the job and let them go.”

That’s not an easy task when having had his hand in everything for the first 18 years as a single-store dealership. “When I first started, you had to do everything yourself because we weren’t large enough to have people capable of doing it all,” he says.

He hired several territory managers from AGCO, including Tim Van De Velde. “We bought the Wataga store in 2001 and he came to work for us,” McCartney says. “He’s been a big asset and a reason for our success and eventually took over sales management for all of our stores.”

Honing His Knowledge

In the “old days,” McCartney says farmers and dealers could both succeed if they just worked hard at their business. That’s not enough today, he says, noting how much more sophistication is required of farmers in all areas of their business, including the expertise in market-timing their crop sales.

The same is true for dealers, he says, and pointed to the wisdom gained from decades-long participation in peer groups for part of his education. He was an early member of Spader’s peer groups, including working with founder Dwayne Spader.

McCartney credits a lot of knowledge from the fellow dealers in his group, with the biggest lesson being that “good habits are made in bad times, and bad habits are made in good times.”

ACM’s Early Days

Woody McCartney notes that his dad, Al, had an interesting route into the ag machinery business. He never farmed and, in fact, was a city boy from Rockford, Ill. Somehow, McCartney recalls, his dad got into the gas-station business when he got out of the Navy.

“My dad started the business in 1950, right here at this location. He used to own a gas station across the street, and a guy from Allis-Chalmers stopped there one day and said, ‘Anybody around here wants to sell tractors?’ My dad went and asked his partner who shook his head and my dad said ’Well, why don't we do it?’ His partner said, ‘We don't know anything about tractors’ but  my dad went out and told the guy from Allis-Chalmers yes. 

“The guy said, 'OK, I'll be back Monday to sign a contract.’ So that's when we started in 1950.”

The business set up shop across the street and Woody was born a few months later. Brother Al would join in due time, as would McCartney as a 22-year-old graduate from the Univ. of Illinois in 1972.

That group was influential in learning how to control expenses and maintain the absorption rate; for the parts and service departments to help carry the business in slower markets like dealers face today.

Indiana John Deere dealer-principal Jon Castongia (Castongia Tractor) spent decades in McCartney’s group, and credits McCartney for his advancement as a young dealer exec.

“He was easy to talk to and always had good advice,” Castongia says. “I could easily see why customers were drawn to do business with him and why people wanted to work for him. When it came to business, he knew his stuff, never missed a beat and always had good advice. He calls it like he sees it.”

McCartney had his share of early challenges. These not only included the cliff-falling ag economy of the 1980s and 20% interest rates, but the shock of his mainline supplier, Allis Chalmers, going belly up in 1985 and being acquired by Deutz. “One day we’re selling orange A-C tractors and the next day we’re selling green Deutz air-cooled tractors,” he recalls.

2024 Merger with Parallel Ag

On January 1, 2025, the 5-store A.C. McCartney was officially renamed as the Upper Midwest Division of Parallel Ag, which had 12 stores in Texas and Oklahoma. “Parallel Ag was very aligned with the way we were, and that's why we merged with them. We feel like they're a company with the same values as ours,” McCartney says. 

Click here to Learn about the 2024 Merger with Parallel Ag. 

When pressed for the hardest time the “can’t-be-rattled” McCartney cites the A-C news. “It was us vs. the John Deere and Case dealers. We were very fortunate because we had very loyal customers that helped us survive the 1980s. We worked hard to take care of them and our customers took care of us during this time.”

McCartney remains keenly tuned in to industry trends and the boom-bust cycles that always influence farm machinery demand. “You’ve got to know when it’s going down and when it’s going to go back up,” he says. “A lot of times, we were fortunate to have seen it coming. And a big part of that is because we found and hired the best people we could afford and worked to keep them.”

While a lot of current talk is about how to say no to wholegoods inventory temptations, McCartney says it goes the other way, too. “We had seen in 2013 and 2014 how the business would start booming and we loaded up on inventory to make the most of it.”

An Early Consolidator

McCartney was astute to changes in the business. Where customers once managed 160-acre parcels of land, consolidation was driving farmers to increase their acreages by the thousands. “Farmers consolidated and got bigger and we as dealers had to get bigger too. It was going to be hard to survive as a one-store dealership anymore.

“We realized in 2000 that, if we’re going to be successful, we had to expand. So that’s when we started looking to buy other stores, starting with our first acquisition in Wataga, Ill., and 3 others over the next 18 years. We knew we had to keep growing and these acquisitions were all single-store operations that didn’t have a next generation ready to take over the business.”

ACM became one of the first non-Caterpillar AGCO dealers to have multiple locations. “AGCO encouraged us to make these acquisitions,” he says. “They respected the way we did business and wanted us to be successful and to expand.”