The Gasoline Tractor

Eschewing the automobile, Iowa inventors Charles Hart and Charles Parr in 1901 built the fi rst gasoline tractor with the wide frame of the steam tractor, a low center of gravity, and low gearing. Like the steam tractor, the Hart-Parr tractor was heavy at 10 tons and had a wide turning radius. By 1906 Hart and Parr had pared the weight to 5 tons, increased horsepower to thirty, and began using the term tractor for their machine. As did Ford in the auto industry, Hart and Parr aimed to mass-produce the tractor and to standardize parts. By one estimate, more than thirty firms were manufacturing some 2,000 tractors a year by 1909. The first tractors, with studded steel wheels and no rubber tires, sacrificed comfort for traction and did not immediately replace the horse. Rather than decrease, the number of horses on U.S. farms increased from roughly 4 million in 1910 to 4.5 million in 1916.

Two events turned farmers toward the tractor. First, epidemics of spinal meningitis and blackleg swept American stables in the late 1910s, leaving farmers short of their traditional source of traction. Second, World War I heightened the demand for labor and food. The Allies, desperate for horses to pull materiel and supplies, inundated the United States with orders. The Avery Company of Peoria, Illinois, was one company among many to turn the war to its advantage, in 1914 declaring the sale of horses to the Allies a patriotic duty―a shrewd act given the high price of both horses and feed. The proceeds of these sales, the Avery Company hoped, would go to buy its tractors. The war siphoned off not only horses but also men, who entered the military or took jobs in the city at greater rates. Short of horses and laborers, American farms went from having 4,000 tractors in 1911 to 250,000 in 1920.

By then, John Deere, International Harvester, and Ford were vying for the market. Henry Ford, who had grown up on a farm and sought to improve agriculture as he had travel, in 1915 built his first tractor, the Tracford, boasting that it could do the work of twelve horses and touting its simplicity, durability, and ease of operation. Ford priced it at $250, nearly half the $495 that Happy Farm Tractor Company, for example, charged and less than the $325 of the Model T. Ford unveiled the Fordson tractor in 1917, selling more than 7,000 tractors that year and more than any other manufacturer in 1918. International Harvester rather than Ford, however, made the real innovations, building in the 1920s the Farmall, a narrow tractor that had a small turning radius and so could cultivate and harvest the row crops of the Midwest and South, not merely the wheat of the West. In the 1920s the corn picker complemented the tractor in the Midwest and mechanized the last phase of corn culture.

The tractor came with an ideology of efficiency that shaped the lives of farmers. The agricultural colleges and experiment stations had in the 19th century urged the farmer to be scientific in his work, by which they meant a willingness to apply the results of experiments on the farm. Now, in the era of the tractor, the colleges and experiment stations wanted farmers to be businessmen in addition to receptors of science. Whereas the horse could advance both work and leisure, the tractor could further only the industrialization of agriculture. The tractor enabled farmers to cultivate more land than had been possible with the horse, and with an increase in the scale of operations came the need to compartmentalize every component of work. Gone was the woman of the prairie who broke the sod alongside her husband. He now devolved on her the record keeping necessary to analyze every facet of the business and to satisfy creditors who had loaned them the money to buy a tractor and its associated gadgets. Her work was in the house and his on the land. Gone, too, were the days when children had to help with farm work, particularly during planting and harvest, tasks the tractor could manage on its own. Instead, children spent more time in school, and some even went to college. The towns and cities that had drawn men and women to the factory during World War I now enticed the young to their college campuses. The agricultural colleges were both a source of information for farmers and a lure to their children. With a mixture of pride and regret, parents watched their children graduate from these colleges as engineers and entomologists rather than return to the land as farmers.

With the industrialization of agriculture, the tractor shaped labor to its rhythm. The horse had walked no more than two miles an hour, the limit at which a human can walk without undue fatigue, but the tractor covered ground at an unremitting five miles an hour without the need to rest. The tractor kept the farmer on the move for days that stretched to eighteen hours. The routine of planting or another chore came to resemble the monotony of the big rig on an unvarying stretch of highway. Farmers suffered back pain from jostling, particularly before the introduction of rubber tires on the tractor, and hearing loss from the drone of the engine. Bereft of the romanticism of the horse, the tractor made the farmer more an operator of machines than a tender of plants. Business acumen and an attention to commodity prices meant more in the machine age than an intuitive ability to gauge the time at which a corn plant silks.

The tractor sharpened the distinction between owner and worker. The freeholder of the Midwest and West owned a tractor, whereas the tenant and sharecropper of the South, too poor to get credit from a bank, made do with the horse or the mule, a hybrid of the horse and donkey. The migrant laborer likewise was too poor to own a tractor. On the bottom rungs of the agricultural ladder, the tenant, sharecropper, and landless laborer failed to reap the rewards of the machine age.

The pace of mechanization slackened during the Great Depression, with the number of tractors in the United States holding constant at roughly 1 million between 1931 and 1934. Their incomes dwindling, farmers had little to invest in technology during these years. Between 1930 and 1935, investment in farm equipment fell by $336 million as labor became the substitute for technology and capital. Men who had lost their job in a factory returned to relatives in the countryside to work part-time. Awash in labor, farmers had neither the money nor an immediate incentive to adopt new technology.

The production of materiel during World War II lifted the United States out of the Great Depression and restored farmers to prosperity. Those who had forgone technology during the 1930s out of necessity were able to buy the latest implements: tractors with rubber tires and the ability to cover five miles an hour in the field and twenty on the road, disk plows, eight row planters, and corn and cotton pickers. In the 1960s agricultural engineers developed machines that plowed, planted, and applied fertilizer in a single pass. In the 1970s tractors increased from sixty to two hundred horsepower. In the 1980s air-conditioned cabs became standard, and in the 1990s the first use of satellites enabled farmers to plow, plant, cultivate, and harvest in perfectly straight rows that do not overlap. Computers told farmers the yield of a crop while they were harvesting it and projected the amount and type of fertilizer, insecticide, and herbicide they would need the next year.

These technologies complicated the lives of farmers. The agricultural colleges and experiment stations urged them to modernize by adopting the newest tractor or combine, but these purchases indebted farmers, increasing their anxiety about their ability to repay loans in an era of low commodity prices. This anxiety heightened for farmers who could not insulate themselves from global forces. American farmers in the late 20th century could do nothing to influence the price of wheat in Argentina, and yet a bumper harvest there might diminish the price of wheat in North Dakota. Indebted and buffeted by forces outside their control, farmers were also beset by technical challenges. They needed specialized knowledge to understand the increasingly technical reports of agribusiness firms and to use the latest software. The lives of farmers in 2000 focused on reading technical literature, troubleshooting software, keeping abreast of commodity prices and projections for the future, and adhering to the maintenance schedule for a twenty-four-row planter. In the 20th century, technology had made the farmer a manager of information and implements.