Word: tractor
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...World War II, a two-row cultivator was considered big; now the large size is four-row. One enterprising Iowa farmer has even welded together enough equipment to make himself an eight-row planter, thus spanning twelve acres an hour at 4 m.p.h. International Harvester has a new Electrall tractor with an electric generator that can power attachments to do any job from boring post holes to shearing sheep. If a storm knocks out farm power lines, it can be hooked into the household circuits...
...Owatonna Tool Co. is building a self-propelled hay "swather" to take the place of the standard 7-ft. mower. Twelve feet across, it will slice through fields, cut and pile the hay in rows in a single operation, thus displacing (with a single operator) two men and three tractors, two mowers and a pair of hay rakes. Ford is working on a low-cost combine for medium-sized farms, a new corn picker that can be attached to the front of a standard four-wheeled tractor. Another new development: a machine called the Wonsover, which a Maine inventor named...
...rate of 100 bu. a day. But today's farmer has little interest in such events; with a mechanical corn picker, he thinks nothing of picking and husking 1,500 bu of corn a day. For machine-age farmers a big event at fairs is the tractor rodeo," in which farmers compete at starting tractors attaching implements, plowing the straightest, fastest furrows. Merely hitching up a plow was once a backbreaking task-the heavy implement had to be lifted by several men, worried into position bolted into place. But on 1955's tractors hydraulic lifts make...
...tractor rodeos are symptomatic of a vast and sweeping change in U.S. agriculture. Like U.S. businessmen, the nation's farmers have turned to automation. Typical of the great change are the Bidart brothers, John, 41, and Frank, 49, who started out in 1932 with 300 acres near Bakersfield, Calif., a borrowed tractor and four mules. Now they farm 5,600 acres of prime cotton land by machine. They have a cotton gin, 14 cotton pickers (costing $11,000 apiece), 24 tractors and eight trucks all equipped with two-way radios. Says John Bidart who also owns half-interest...
Once farmers pooled their money to buy a tractor or a combine, shared it from farm to farm. Now every farmer wants his own. Any new development catches on with prairiefire speed. In California's Kern County, for example, cotton now accounts for 40% of the county's $224 million annual income from agriculture, largely because of mechanical cotton pickers. Says one equipment dealer: "In 1946, we sold six cotton pickers For the next eight years we never sold less than 100 machines, and in 1951 our sales-went over 200." Today, there are about 1,500 cotton...