The Fascinating Story of Bush Hog, The Rotary Cutter That Became A Household Word

In 1951, a small team in Selma, Alabama built one machine per week on a dirt floor. That machine cost $320. Today, it mows over 30 million acres of American land every year — and its name became the word farmers use for an entire category of equipment. Bush Hog did not start with a marketing budget, a distribution network, or a factory worth talking about. It started with one product, one salesman, and a demonstration strategy built entirely on letting the machine prove itself in a field. What followed was seven decades of ownership changes, corporate acquisitions, economic downturns, and an identity so deeply embedded in American farming culture that no boardroom decision could ever touch it. In this video, we trace the full story of Bush Hog — from the Model 12 rotary cutter and the engineering that made it different, to the moment a single sentence spoken by an elderly farmer in worn overalls gave the company its name, to the acquisition by Alamo Group in 2009 that made it part of the largest agricultural mower manufacturer in the world. This is the story of how a practical tool, built to solve a problem no one else had solved, turned a brand name into a verb.