Progressive Tractor & Implement Grows Within CASE Dealer Network

Aug 27, 2024

Racine, Wis. - CASE Construction Equipment dealer Progressive Tractor & Implement Co. LLC (PTI) announced Aug. 22 they are acquiring the stores and territories of Heartland Equipment to expand their business into the northeastern Arkansas and Memphis areas and help more customers in the region succeed with CASE equipment.

The acquisition marks a new period of growth for leading equipment dealer PTI as they increase their team to over 500 employees and their overall footprint from 22 to 27 locations, supplying the latest construction and agricultural equipment from CASE CE and CASE IH. After the acquisition, PTI will offer construction equipment in Jonesboro and West Memphis, Arkansas, in addition to existing CASE Construction Equipment locations in Opelousas, Lacassine and Lafayette, Louisiana.

“This is an important time for our organization,” said Thomas Soileau, PTI owner and dealer principal. “We are thrilled to welcome the employees of Heartland Equipment into the PTI family and are excited to work with the wonderful people in these communities. We pride ourselves on our ability to provide first-class service to our customers and look forward to enhancing our reach and capabilities as we grow our business into northeast Arkansas and the surrounding areas of Memphis, Tennessee.”

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Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.