Deere to close Clarion sprayer plant by October 2029

By Nathan Brooks

Deere & Company will shut Hagie Manufacturing’s Clarion plant by the end of October 2029, ending 79 years of self-propelled crop-sprayer production at a site with employment of about 300 at full capacity.

Deere acquired Hagie in 2020, six years before this report, and plans to move Clarion’s sprayer production to Louisiana. Ray Hagie invented the first self-propelled crop sprayer in 1947.

City Administrator Clint Middleton, who has served since 2019 and has lived in Clarion for 27 years, called the decision “disappointing.” He and other city officials are working with state and regional partners to plan for the site’s future and find a buyer before the three-year runway ends.

Wright County Economic Development says the plant employs about 300 when operating at full capacity. The agency gave no staffing date or counting method, so the figure describes potential operating scale rather than a verified current payroll.

What does this change for Clarion and farmers?

For area workers, the immediate task is finding a buyer before closure. Middleton said he has contacted local plant managers to arrange a meeting and obtain more information on the buildings.

No prospective buyer, financial terms or workforce-retention plan is identified in the source. It provides no timetable for layoffs, reassignment or severance, so its full-capacity employment figure should not be treated as a verified count of immediate job losses.

The campus has two large buildings:

• One dates to the 1950s and has received several renovations and additions.
• The other began as a warehouse built by Meredith Corporation in the 1980s; Hagie Manufacturing bought it in 2008.

A private street separates the facilities, so Middleton said different companies could buy them. He called them “two good spaces to show prospective businesses.”

Hagie Manufacturing and Iowa Specialty Hospital are Clarion’s largest employers, according to Middleton, making any sale or replacement tenant consequential for the city’s employment base.

For growers, the announcement changes where self-propelled sprayers are made, but it does not quantify effects on equipment availability, input costs, basis or farm margins. The source provides no production volume, order backlog, dealer inventory, delivery schedule or price change. In practical terms, procurement could shift as production moves to Louisiana; the cost effect remains unquantified.

The source does not identify the Louisiana operation that will take the sprayer work, the output volume involved or the production-transfer schedule. Clarion’s buyer search has no named candidate or disclosed terms in the report.

Earlier in the same week, Deere announced a separate shift of hay-cutting and baling equipment production from its Ottumwa plant to Des Moines. The Ottumwa factory has operated since 1911 and will close in fall 2028 when that transition is complete.

The second move shifts another machinery operation for hay production, but the announcement likewise gives no unit volume or pricing data. Neither Deere announcement details farm-program subsidies, crop acreage, yields or changes in grain basis, so their effects on growers’ margins cannot be calculated from the available figures.

The next checkpoints are the fall 2028 Ottumwa closure and the search for a Clarion buyer before October 2029. What happens over those three years will determine whether the two Clarion buildings retain agricultural work or go to other users.