What happened here is not so much that one company sells direct and one does not, its based on how they structured their financing. FarmTrac was delivering machines to dealers and offering huge dealer sales allowances. This enabled them to book false profits up front by putting a machine on a dealers lot. When a machine sold they had to pay back these incentives to the dealers (or LTZ customers). Kubota, CNH, Deere, etc can't do this as they floorplan their own equipment. These small equipment companies can't pull that off so they use companies like Textron to bankroll their operations. As I understand it, Textron is not nessesarly the bad guy beyond the fact that they should have been blowing the whistle when they saw FarmTrac pumping dealers and LTZ customers to cover their operating costs. The recomendations comming from the dealer associations is that we stick with companies who bankroll their own inventory so they can't pull stunts like this. Beyond that, I think everything will be more aware of some of the tatics that where employed here.
Feel free to correct me if I got any facts wrong.