BLACK CREEK, Wis. — Duane Blom gave a guided tour of sorts through the neatly lined tractors, combines and farm equipment at All States Ag Parts in Black Creek.

From the driver's seat of a pickup truck as he made his way to find specific parts for a customer, Blom pointed out tractors and combines from Case IH and New Holland, along with tractors from John Deere and the odd Belarus.

He was looking for lights for a John Deere tractor.

“The most common are lights and fenders,” he said about customer requests. “On combines it’s usually always pulleys, gears, sprockets or shafts.”

Part of his job, and the job of the yard, is finding parts — some of them decades old — for customers around the country.

“The combines, they end up being empty shells when we’re done with them,” Blom said. “Some of the tractors have been picked down to nothing left, just a bare casing sometimes. We’ve even been selling those lately.”

All States has more than a dozen locations around the nation supplying producers with a myriad of tractor, combine and other farm equipment parts.

Black Creek Manager Peter Lauer said the job is rewarding.

“It’s like a treasure hunt for both the customer and us,” he said. “When you find it, it’s a good feeling.”

Large warehouses in both Black Creek and other locations house parts of all shapes, sizes and needs.

Lauer, who has been in the farm salvage industry for more than 30 years. He said in the past two years the store has seen an uptick in business.

“I think it was in large part because people didn’t have anywhere to go,” he said. “So they were fixing up the things that were sitting out behind the shed for the longest time and repairing things that maybe wouldn’t have repaired normally.”

Helping those customers get those parts is part of the satisfaction Blom takes from his job.

“If it’s the right tractor, it’ll get picked to nothing,” he said. “Then there are some tractors where just two things come off and we’ll recycle it.”