A small mowing operation outside Harlow, run by a farmer named Curtis Boyd, heard about the tractor through a cousin at the diesel shop. Curtis did not take anybody's word for anything. He asked twice whether the tractor had actually been tested under load, not just started in a yard. Isaiah told him he could run it on a real job for ten days before paying a dime. Curtis bush-hogged eleven acres of overgrown pasture with it that week, came back with clippings still stuck to the tires, and paid thirty-two hundred on the spot, more than the entire original auction purchase.
Word moved slow at first, then not so slow. A second buyer took two tractors the following month. A small produce farm asked about a front loader attachment. The question was no longer whether the tractors had value left in them. It was whether Isaiah could get them running fast enough to keep up.
That pace had a cost he had not planned for. Through the fall he pushed as hard as the shed allowed. Diagnose in the morning, pull parts in the afternoon, rebuild and test at night. On a good day he finished two tractors. On a day a rebuild needed a part he did not have among the donors, one was the ceiling, and some days he finished none. He had sold fourteen machines by early winter, and the cash covered parts, fuel, and a small cushion, but it was not profit worth talking about. Still, for the first time, Isaiah let himself believe the thing had a future.
That belief got tested when Cypress Grounds Group called. Cypress ran grounds maintenance contracts for HOAs, a couple of school districts, and a county parks department across three counties, and their operations manager, Patrice Odum, had gotten Isaiah's number from Curtis Boyd. She was direct about what she needed. Equipment that held up under daily commercial use, not weekend duty. Isaiah sold her one unit for thirty-four hundred, delivered it himself, and calibrated it on site. For thirteen days it ran fine. On the fourteenth, one of Patrice's crews was towing a core aerator up a grade behind a retention pond. The tractor's loader and its hydrostatic drive pulled off the same hydraulic circuit, and when pressure dropped, it dropped everywhere at once. The loader arm sagged, and the drive lurched. The operator got it stopped before it rolled back into the fence line, but it took the rest of the afternoon to sort out, and the crew lost the job.