Agricultural machinery refers to the number of wheel and crawler tractors excluding garden tractors in use in agriculture at the end of the calendar year specified or during the first quarter of the following year. Arable land includes land defined by the FAO as land under temporary crops double-cropped areas are counted once , temporary meadows for mowing or for pasture, land under market or kitchen gardens, and land temporarily fallow.
Land abandoned as a result of shifting cultivation is excluded. The Agriculture Data Brief spans land use, machinery, and fertilizers to agricultural production, trade, and forecasts, providing you with the latest data and insights developed using recognized data sources to support your analysis.
Okay to continue Our website uses cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. A large group uses threshing machines belted to steam-powered traction engines to process mountains of wheat. Animals were still being used to haul the wagons. Note the small tenders of coal being towed by the traction engines. Courtesy of Library of Congress. Tractors are born Charles Hart and Charles Parr set up a business in Charles City, Iowa, in , originally selling a two-cylinder gasoline engine they developed.
In the firm built 15 self-propelled traction engines. As part of their advertising campaign, their sales manager invented a new word to describe their product: tractor. The word "tractor" was first coined by the Hart Parr company. The museum's Hart Parr 3 is the oldest surviving internal combustion engine tractor. Relatively few farmers could justify the purchase of this 14,pound monster, and despite its size the machine only produced 30 horsepower. Most farmers did not need a large tractor.
Instead, they were attracted to small, inexpensive general-purpose machines that could do both field and belt work in which the tractor powers another machine with a long leather belt. At first, it was not clear what type of firm—automotive or agricultural—would build and market lightweight internal combustion tractors.
In nearly manufacturers sold tractors, but total sales were small. Ford and International Harvester built the market by mass-producing tractors and engaging in a price war. Deere and Co. By over a million lightweight tractors had been sold, but competition narrowed. The Fordson was the first tractor sold by Ford in the U. It quickly became popular: Ford sold 36, tractors in In , with slumping sales, Ford abandoned U.
In the s and s tractor use had successfully displaced mules and horses. Manufacturers refined the equipment, adding new technology like three-point hitches and power take offs to power auxiliary equipment. In the s Allis-Chalmers began research of fuel cell tractors. Unlike standard batteries, fuel cells do not store energy but convert chemical energy to electric energy.
A new source of power, then, would be valuable to the farmer if it could replace the horsepower requirements of plowing, as long as the cost was less than that of maintaining one to two extra horses. It would be even more valuable if it could economically replace all of the functions currently performed by draft animals, and further if it could facilitate automation of the cotton and corn picking operations.
As early as the s, engineers had succeeded in producing steam traction engines, referred to today as steam tractors. These monsters, weighing in excess of 30, pounds excluding water , could move under their own power, and had impressive horsepower capacity. Unfortunately, their size, mechanical complexity, and constant danger of explosion made these traction engines unusable for most farms in North America. In all but the driest soils, steam traction engines tended to become mired in the mud and refuse to move.
Because of these handicaps, the use of steam tractors increased slowly in the United States during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Annual production of less than units per year in the s had increased to around in the ten years after Nonetheless, the rate of growth of steam horsepower was far smaller than the growth in animal horsepower.
For the reasons mentioned above, adoption of steam power was clearly not a candidate to replace the horse. With the commercialization of the internal combustion engine, a more practical alternative emerged.
Farmers bought large numbers of stationary gasoline engines in the first decade of the twentieth century, and quickly became familiar with their operation. A wide variety of household chores were simplified by the use of stationary engines, including pumping water, washing clothes, and churning butter. The first tractors shared similar traits to the steam traction engines. Weighing between 20, and 30, pounds, with huge steel wheels or tracks, these models were large and expensive.
Fairly quickly, the large manufacturers, including Hart-Parr, International Harvester, Case, and Rumely had reduced the size and cost. These tractors proved to be excellent at plowing, and were quite capable of driving mowers and reapers. The large steel wheels, low clearance, and substantial weight made them unsuitable for cultivating growing crops like corn and cotton, however.
Henry Ford, who had tinkered with steam and gasoline tractors prior to achieving his success with automobile production, introduced a small, inexpensive model which he called the Fordson during the World War I. This model sold well for several years, aided considerably by a war-caused shortage of horses.
The competition with Ford drove International Harvester to make significant improvements in its tractors. The first innovation to appear was the power take-off, offered after This device, a metal shaft turned by the rotation of the tractor motor, allowed implements to be driven directly by the tractor engine, as opposed to obtaining power from a wheel rolling along the ground.
The power take-off quickly became a standard feature on all tractors, and implement makers began the process of re-designing their equipment to take advantage of this innovation. An even more important improvement by International Harvester was the introduction of a general-purpose tractor, the Farmall, in This model, with high ground clearance, small front wheels, and minimal weight, was designed for cultivating, as well as for plowing and cutting. It was tested in Texas in , and was released for broad scale distribution in In addition, these same firms began the process of modifying their implements for these tractors, and the wholesale replacement of the horse began in earnest.
Three other improvements were critical in completing the technology base for the tractor. Deere released a power lift for its models beginning in This device allowed the implement to be raised before every turn by pulling a lever.
Prior to this, the farmer had to lift the implement by hand at each turn, which was a time-consuming and enervating task. As with the power takeoff, the power lift was rapidly adopted by other tractor makers. Rubber tires first became available for tractors in , and by had largely replaced steel wheels. The low-pressure tires not only did less damage to fields, but also allowed a higher forward speed, due to reduced friction.
Finally, the development of diesel engines in the mids gave farmers access to a lower-cost fuel for their machines. Many tractors from that time forward had a small gasoline tank for cold starts, and a large diesel tank for the majority of the operation. This tractor was smaller and less expensive than the original Farmall, but had the same general-purpose capabilities. These small tractors often featured adjustable front wheels and high ground clearance, which made them considerably more flexible than the larger models.
A final innovation was responsible for bringing Ford back into the tractor business in In that year, the firm agreed to enter into a joint venture with Irish inventor Harry Ferguson. Beginning in the mids, and despite the ongoing depression in the United States, tractor sales increased rapidly. Figure 1 shows the number of tractors on farms from through By the latter date, the process of technological diffusion was essentially complete. With the exception of the deep South, the increase in percent of farms with tractors from year to year had stopped.
The general-purpose tractor proved to be an excellent replacement for the horse in plowing, soil preparation, planting, and cultivating tasks for a wide variety of field crops. In addition, the tractor was fully capable of providing power for mowing hay and for harvesting of wheat and other small grains. Horse-drawn combines had been available since the s, and had found limited acceptance on the larger farms of the arid West.
However, a large team of horses was required to drag the heavy, complex machine through the fields. The tractors of the s and s had no trouble pulling a re-designed combine, and they began a process of rapid adoption in the Midwest. Eventually, a self-propelled combine was produced, with the tractor engine and cab subsumed into the combine apparatus. The general-purpose tractor was not capable of bringing mechanization to the corn and cotton harvest until separate, but related innovations produced a corn picker in the s and a mechanical cotton picker after the Second World War.
Prior to the development and adoption of the corn picker, corn was often cut with a binder, followed by manual shelling. One of the more important uses of stationary gas engines early in the twentieth century was for the shelling of corn. The picker combined the operations of cutting and shelling, and also distributed the stalks back onto the field, eliminating an additional step.
Mechanical cotton pickers fundamentally altered not only the harvesting of cotton, but the very nature of cotton growing in the United States. The mechanical picker, even after extensive development, produced higher crop losses than hand picking in the hot, humid areas where most cotton was grown — Mississippi, Alabama, and east Texas. In the dry areas of west Texas, however, the picker was very efficient, both in terms of labor effort and crop yields. The mechanical cotton picker thus precipitated a relocation of cotton production westward, resulting in large-scale migration out of the deep South in the years after World War II.
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