View From The Cab

By David Tollefson, Columnist

All of us farmers, no matter the age, have vivid memories of the tractors we learned to drive as we grew up.

In my case, our dad chose a Ford tractor as his first replacement for the horses that he had when he was growing up.

Those sizes of tractors are popular now, but for different reasons. They were between 15 and 25 horsepower. Quite often we see them for sale, after having been refurbished, repainted and most likely new rubber tires put on them.

The primary use, although not totally, would be to drive in parades in the summertime, or for country folks who live in a rural area with a few acres and want a smaller, inexpensive tractor to till their garden and so on.

From “Livinghistoryfarm.org” comes some background leading up to the above title about Farmall tractors.

Just after World War 1, Henry Ford revolutionized the tractor industry when he employed mass production assembly lines to build the first Fordson. With his assembly techniques, Ford could offer his tractors at lower prices.

Other manufacturers responded. International Harvester brought out the Farmall using the same production techniques but also offered the ability to cultivate row crops. By 1928, fewer and fewer Fordsons were being sold. Henry Ford lost interest in tractors; he wanted to concentrate on cars, and got out of the ag equipment business.

He stayed out until 1939 when he charged back into the market with a new partner, Harry Ferguson. Ferguson was an Irish inventor who had been forced by catastrophe to come up with a better way of attaching implements to his tractor.

Some early tractors, like the Fordson, had a disturbing tendency – when the plow they were pulling hit a large enough rock, the plow would stop, and the tractor would try to keep going. Many tractors would pivot on the drive wheels, flip over and often kill the driver. The British government ordered Harry Ferguson to cure the problem.

Ferguson came up with the idea of mounting the plow on the rear of the tractor with a 3-point hitch arrangement.

That is precisely the kind of tractor my brother and I grew up with. The tractor was low to the ground, and easy to handle for young boys like us.

In 1938, Ferguson demonstrated his tractor to Henry Ford on Ford’s Fairlane estate farm. Ford was so impressed that the two men quickly worked out a partnership deal and shook hands on it. They never wrote out a contract, but Ford was back in the tractor business.

It was a small tractor that out-plowed machines weighing far more. The hydraulic lift system made control of the implements precise and easy. The tractor had a four-cylinder vertical engine that produced 17 hp on the drawbar and 23.5 hp on the belt, in Nebraska tests. Our tractor pulled a fully mounted, 2-14’s plow, turning over a full 28 inches of Blue Mounds soil on the farm I still live on today. By the way, that plow at 28 inches would turn the ground between two of the 30-inch corn rows that we plant now! The tractor sold for $600, a full $100 more than the Allis-Chalmers “B” Or the IH Farmall “A.” By 1942, the Ford-Ferguson had captured 20 percent of the tractor market, compared with IH’s 40 percent.

OK, back to the Farmall story….

In 1919, Bert Benjamin faced a massive challenge.

Cyrus and Harold McCormick wanted a new tractor to combat the growing dominance of Henry Ford’s Fordson.

At that time, International Harvester led the tractor market with a triple crown of horsepower that included the Titan 10-20, International 8-16 and McCormick 15-30. Ford knocked down all three of those kingpins with one roll in 1918 by introducing the affordable Fordson. Within five years, the Fordson had claimed 76% of the horsepower market.

Benjamin, the superintendent of IH’s experimental division, knew the only way to compete with the Fordson was to create the “killer app” of a tractor for its time. The company had been experimenting with a number of tractor designs, particularly a motor cultivator, which was all the craze in the late 1910s and early 1920s. But Benjamin had a different vision of a combined tractor truck with a triple power plan – horsepower being fed to the belt pulley, PTO (power take-off) and drawbar – which was not only light on its feet, but also stood tall in the field to clear crops being cultivated.

After much argument and hand-wringing among IH management over the cost of an entirely new tractor, this combination machine was launched in 1923 and production began in 1924, bearing a name that would become as famous as Kleenex and Hoover.

Dubbed the Farmall, it originally sold for $825, a price that could do battle against the Fordson. By 1926 sales hit 4,430, and 9,502 in 1927. By April 1930, the 100,000th Farmall left the Farmall Works in Rock Island, Illinois.

Sidenotes:

* Ed Kimball of IH gets credit for suggesting the “Farm-All” moniker Nov. 10, 1919. The hyphen was subsequently dropped and the brand name Farmall adopted.

* Farmalls were painted blue-gray until Nov. 1, 1937, when the color was replaced with No. 50 Motor Red, which has remained the official paint.

* In the early 1950s, Farmall turned out its millionth tractor, a Model M, at its Rock Island, Illinois, plant. Farmall production reached the 5 million-mark with a Model 1066 in 1974.

My own experience with Farmall is that for a few years I had a Farmall 560 diesel, which was a very popular tractor around here. It had a lever that you could pull, and it would shift down “on the go” to a lower gear ratio that would often get you over a hill; then you could shift up to the regular gear for most of the work. It made a 5-speed transmission into a 10 speed, but the disadvantage to that was that in “torque amplifier” gear, it was free-wheeling, so if you were going downhill with a load of grain behind you, the motor would not hold the speed down.

In 1975 I bought a brand new 966 Farmall that was equipped with a “Year-Around” brand of cab. It did not have air conditioning, but did have a heater. The windows on the sides and rear, and also the doors could be opened and locked for lots of free air conditioning (if you could stand the dust). That was the last Farmall that I experienced. Later I bought a couple of associated red tractors, but they were called Case-IH Internationals.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Please contact David Tollefson with thoughts or comments on this or future columns at: adtollef@hcinet.net