Tractor Wars (YT Video)

For thousands of years, farming was driven by the muscle of either animals or humans. With the invention of the steam engine, industrialists brought steam power to farms. The inventions of the reaper and steel plow began a rush to mechanize farming. In the early 20th century, hundreds of companies were experimenting with vehicles to bring power farming to agriculture. By 1929, Deere, Ford and International Harvester were among the few dozen companies that remained, but the tractor form we recognize today had finally emerged and began rapidly replacing muscle as the primary source of power on the farm.

I stumbled upon this video a couple days ago. Iowa PBS is making it available free on YouTube for a limited time.

It's a great sweeping history of the development of the tractor from the very beginning, the huge competitive landscape in the early 20th century, technical innovation, fights for market share, the adoption on farms, the social upheaval of the movement of people from farms to cities.

The enormous improvement in farm production and productivity is often overlooked and ignored. It was all driven by the Internal Combustion Engine combined with tractor evolution and implement innovation. It's amazing that the amount of horsepower on farms provided by tractors did not eclipse horses until 1945.

There's a lot of emphasis on Henry Ford and his introduction of the Fordson tractor. Like the Model T, he thought he had created the perfect tractor and ceased innovating. His board insisted on the development of the Model A automobile, but they exited the tractor business after moving production to Ireland for a few years.

It's ironic that the first steam tractors were behemoths suitable only for the larges prairie wheat farms. Farmers were asking for smaller tractors that could work smaller family farms. That, of course, spawned more innovation and larger machines which led to the demise of the small family farm and the rise of huge agribusiness.

Now our food production and farming is under assault by liberal globalists because of CO2 and nitrogen.

It's refreshing to step back in time and look at the can-do era of massive innovation and productivity improvements before the insane liberals and progs got a foothold in everything.

If you like history, machinery, business, innovation, agriculture and internal combustion, you'll like this video. Cheers!

I forgot to brag...my great great uncle sold the first gasoline tractor in Alberta in 1907. Click the image to go to a larger version you can read.

The tractor was demonstrated on May 16, 1907 on James Bower's Sunnybrook Farm south of Red Deer, Alberta. The sales contract said Mr. Bower could test the tractor for two days and he could return it at his expense to Calgary if he did not buy it. He purchased it. Today, the Sunnybrook Farm is a farm museum. The museum is located at 879 Botterill Crescent, Red Deer, AB, T4R 0T9 -- "Botterill" was my grandma's maiden name and my great great uncle's surname.

Here's a photo of the tractor being tested on the farm. The big guy in the middle is my great great uncle.

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