Yes Dave needs a real bike and these are the color of manure and he wont have to wash them.

I saw one owned by a dyed-in-the-wool Deere guy "here", but I am quite sure they were never distributed in Europe officially.

Were they a "real" production branch of Deere or merely a marketing gag or an item to be given away with a new tractor etc.?

My guess is you could make real money with them if you found a way to bring them over the pond :-)

countryman...

Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will post. But I googled & did some reading on bicycle websites. Seems JD had them mfg by a couple different foreign companies in the early 1970s. There was also a JD bike back in the late 1900s, but that was different. Anyway, supposedly the men's 10 speed bike was very lightly built by a company in Taiwan & was easily broken. The ladies 10 spd was built heavier & lasted longer. The 3 speed was built by yet another company. Not sure of the integrity of that machine. The direct drive (1 speed) balloon-tired model was actually a good bike, so they say.

Again, hopefully we'll get more info from someone knowing their bikes.

PS-I put quite a few thousand km on a bike in Augsburg!