GLASGOW — Dairy farmers Ricky and Keith Long will be among many competitors this week at the 42nd Championship Tractor Pull at the National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville.

The Long brothers, who live just outside of Glasgow, are celebrating their 20th year at the show.

They began entering local farm tractor pulls in 1972.

“We would turn the fuel up on them and change the tires on Friday and take them back off on Monday morning and put them back in the field,” said Keith.

In 1980, they stopped using their farm tractors and built a tractor specifically for competition in tractor pulls. Eight years later they switched to pulling two-wheel drive trucks. In 1990 they competed at the National Farm Machinery Show for the first time with two-wheel trucks at a time when pulling two-wheel trucks was just becoming popular. They haven’t missed the two-wheel truck pulling competition once in 20 years. They’ve won the finals once and placed second or third numerous times.

The secret to winning, Keith said, is “going farther than everybody else.”

“It takes a lot of luck. But then you’ve got to have the equipment to do it with,” Ricky said.

The brothers are part of the Lucas Oil Pro Pulling League and have been dedicated to that circuit for 11 years. They recently picked up an additional sponsor, MAV TV, a cable sports channel.

“We’ve never had a sponsor until this year,” Ricky said.

They take part in 15 to 16 competitions during the summer months, with the closest events being in Owensboro and Evansville, Ind.

“Over the years we’ve pulled from Canada to Florida and from Maryland to Texas,” Keith said. “A 10-hour drive now is just down the road for us.”

Squeezing in time to travel such distances around milking between 500 to 600 head of cattle is not an easy thing to do.

“It takes a lot of planning to get away,” Keith said. “You just don’t leave on Friday. You start planning earlier in the week about who is going to take care of everything. Thank goodness for cell phones.”

Their younger brother, Eddie, steps in to take care of the farm while they are away.

Pulling two-wheel trucks is not a cheap hobby.

“How expensive is any hobby?” asked Keith. “The sky is the limit.”

“We’ve invested in this hobby for over 40 years,”  Ricky said. “If we had to do it overnight, we couldn’t do it.” 

“We’ve been very fortunate,” Keith said.

“These trucks will never, ever pay for themselves, but we try to do well enough with them that they keep themselves going,” Ricky said. “It’s kind of like a boat. You can’t fish enough to pay for a boat.”

The trucks have changed quite a bit since the Long brothers first began competing.

“It’s astronomical how much they’ve changed — the horse power and the frames and the transmission — everything about it. It’s all about your strength, your ability and horse power,” Keith said. “The supercharger on these trucks right here cost more than the first truck I had.”

It’s not the thrill of winning a competition that they like most about the sport. Instead, it’s getting to work on the trucks and the people they meet they like best.

“If you depend on winning, you’re going to be disappointed, so you better find something you enjoy about it more than that,” Ricky said.

The brothers can be found in their garage working on their trucks often at night or on days when it’s raining. They’ve made many friends over the years through their involvement with the sport.

“More than likely at our funerals our pallbearers will be from different states,” Keith said, adding their closest friends are those who are also involved with the sport and live in other states.

The Longs have no specific goal they wish to reach with the sport.

“We’ve reached so many goals,” Keith said. “This sponsor was a big one. We’ve won basically every, at one time or another, every national event somewhere, sometime. We’ve been fortunate over the years. We’ve done well.”

The only thing they are concerned with now is competing in one event after another.

Following the National Farm Machinery Show, their next competition will be in Concord, N.C. in May.