Kubota's Great Plains Manufacturing and Land Pride: The Implement Side of the Business

Oct 3

3 min read

Updated: Oct 3

A Kubota compact tractor is only half the equation for most contractors who actually buy one — the implements that bolt onto it are what turn the tractor into a mower, a tiller, a box-blade grader, or a post-hole digger. Fewer people realize that a large share of those implements, sold under the Land Pride brand, come from a company Kubota itself owns: Great Plains Manufacturing.

A Partnership That Became an Acquisition

Kubota and Land Pride had already been partnered since 2007, with Land Pride supplying performance-matched implements to Kubota's dealer and customer base across the U.S. and Canada. That relationship became ownership on May 13, 2016, when Kubota Tractor Corporation announced it was acquiring Great Plains Manufacturing — Land Pride's Kansas-based parent company, which operates across five separate divisions with additional manufacturing in Sleaford, England.

Kubota's then-CEO Masato Yoshikawa framed the deal as aligning with "our long-term strategic vision to continue our market expansion and provide high-quality products and comprehensive solutions for our customers," pointing to shared founding values around quality, innovation, and engineering excellence between the two companies. The structure of the deal mattered as much as the price: all five Great Plains divisions kept operating with their existing infrastructure intact, founder Roy Applequist stayed on the leadership team, and President Linda Salem continued overseeing operations — Kubota bought the company to keep it running as itself, not to absorb and rebrand it.

Why This Matters More Than It Sounds Like It Should

A contractor financing a Grand L70 or a BX90 doesn't typically think about who engineers the box blade or the rotary cutter they'll run behind it, but that engineering relationship affects fit, durability, and parts availability directly. Because Land Pride implements are engineered specifically to match Kubota's PTO ratings, three-point hitch geometry, and hydraulic specs rather than built as generic third-party add-ons, a Kubota-and-Land-Pride pairing tends to fit and perform more predictably than mixing in an unrelated implement brand — and because Kubota owns the implement maker outright, that engineering coordination isn't a loose marketing partnership, it's an internal product-line relationship.

The Product Range That Actually Matters on a Jobsite

Great Plains operates across five divisions covering a genuinely wide implement range — everything from rotary cutters and box blades to tillage, seeding, and landscape-maintenance equipment — which means a Kubota tractor owner has a deep, purpose-built implement catalog to draw from rather than hunting across unrelated third-party brands for each individual tool. For a contractor running a Grand L70 or a BX90 across mowing, finish-grading, and light land-maintenance contracts, that range covers the overwhelming majority of what a given jobsite actually needs without ever leaving the Kubota-Land Pride ecosystem.

Financing the Machine and the Implement Together

A tractor without implements is a very expensive lawn ornament — the real productive value shows up once a box blade, mower deck, or tiller is actually attached and working. That's a case for financing the tractor and its core implement package together rather than stretching the budget on the tractor alone and leaving the implement for "later," since "later" often means months of a half-equipped machine sitting underutilized while the actual jobs that justified buying it in the first place go unbid.

Why Owning the Full Package Beats Renting Pieces of It

Renting a tractor-and-implement combination piecemeal, job by job, means paying repeatedly for availability you never actually own — and rental yards rarely stock the exact Land Pride implement spec a given job calls for, leaving a contractor working with whatever's on the lot rather than the tool actually matched to the job. Equipment financing that covers the BX90 or Grand L70 and its matched implement package turns that same recurring spend into equity on a system built to work together from day one, which is exactly the kind of growth-oriented financing BFC provides to startups and established landscaping, land-maintenance, and site-development contractors nationwide, regardless of credit profile.

Landscaping companies maintaining commercial properties, land-clearing crews bush-hogging overgrown lots, and site-development contractors doing finish grading are the exact businesses built on this tractor-and-implement relationship — and knowing that Kubota owns the implement maker, rather than just endorsing it, is one more reason the pairing holds up as reliably as it does.