Farm Tractors. Michael Williams

      Like most tractors, Twin City machines, built by the Minneapolis Steel and Machinery Co., had become lighter and more versatile machines by the 1920s. The 1926 Twin City 21-32 tractor in the photograph was a four-cylinder model producing almost 36 HP.

      In the second half of the nineteenth century, it was the steam engine that provided farmers with their first alternative to muscle power for jobs ranging from plowing to threshing. Until then, muscle power was provided by people who worked on the land and by large numbers of draft animals, including horses, oxen, mules and, occasionally, donkeys. For centuries, animals were used to pull the heavy loads, to plow and cultivate the soil, to power machines that threshed the grain and prepared feed for livestock and, in some cases, to give their owners a ride to and from the fields each day.

      For the working animals, it was a life of toil, and some were literally worked to death. No doubt there were those that were well cared for and treated with at least a degree of sensitivity, but at a time when so many people experienced brutality in their own lives, there was probably little compassion to spare for the animals with which they worked. As for the humans, although animals provided most of the power needed to grow and harvest crops in areas such as Europe and North America, there was still a huge demand worldwide for manpower in agriculture. Millions of people spent their working lives on farms doing jobs that were often strenuous and repetitive, and sometimes dangerous as well.

      This was the way farming was organized for thousands of years. Viewed from the perspective of highly mechanized agriculture in the twenty-first century, it may have a rustic charm, but it was also an extremely inefficient way to produce food. The large numbers of working animals consumed significant quantities of the food they helped to grow, and the productivity per farm worker was so low that just a few centuries ago well over 50 percent of the working population had to be employed on the land to provide enough food to meet the needs of a country such as Britain or France.

      Steam engines, together with many millions of hard-working horses, oxen and mules, provided most of the farming industry’s power needs before the development of the tractor. This more efficient power source helped to produce food more abundantly and more cheaply than ever before.

      On British farms, the daily work rate for a skilled plowman and two or three horses was an acre (0.4 hectares) per day in medium to heavy soils, increasing to 1.5 acres (0.6 hectares) daily on light, easily worked land. The average horsepower of new tractors sold in Britain during the early 2000s was almost 120 HP, and a plowman with this size of tractor would expect to plow 2 to 3 acres (0.8 to 1.2 hectares) per hour.

      Thanks to the development of the steam engine and the tractor, few people in the developed world experience the stresses and strains of farming solely with muscle power. It remains, however, the daily reality for millions of people in developing countries where food production is still limited to the pace of a team of oxen or the physical strength of a farmer and his family.

      Power farming, based first on the steam engine and then on the tractor, has achieved a massive increase in farming efficiency and productivity. With mechanized agriculture, just 2 or 3 percent of the working population produce enough to feed the other 97 percent or so, with draft animals making occasional nostalgic appearances at old-time farming events and traditional plowing matches.

      J. I. Case Threshing Machine, Co. was one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of agricultural steam engines in the early 1900s. By 1924, the company had become one of the few traditional steam engine manufacturers to make the switch to tractor production.

      The Start of the Revolution

      Britain had already established a clear lead in the use of steam power in factories and in the mining industry, and the first farms to use steam power were also British. The power farming revolution started in a modest way in 1798, when John Wilkinson, a wealthy businessman, installed a stationary engine on his farm near Wrexham in north Wales. This is the first recorded example of steam power being used on a farm, and Wilkinson used it to power a threshing machine, probably replacing one or two horses that would previously have been used for the same job.

      Steam engines were inefficient and extremely expensive in the late eighteenth century, and it is

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